of stone. We passed olive and lemon groves, mills,
vineyards, and millions upon millions of violets. Then the path, which
constantly ascended, grew wilder, but not so wild as Inness. I could not
imagine what possessed him. He sang, told stories, vaulted over Baker,
and laughed until the valley rang again; but as his voice was good and
his stories amusing, we enjoyed his merriment. Miss Elaine looked on, I
thought, with an air of pity; but then Miss Elaine pitied everybody. She
would have pitied Jenny Lind at the height of her fame, and no doubt
when she was in Florence she pitied the Venus de' Medici.

We found Gorbio a little village of six hundred inhabitants, perched on
the point of a rock, with the ground sloping away on all sides; the
remains of its old wall and fortified gates were still to be seen. We
entered and explored its two streets--narrow passageways between the old
stone houses, whose one idea seemed to be to crowd as closely together
and occupy as little of the ground space as possible. Above the
clustered roofs towered the ruined walls of what was once the castle,
the tower only remaining distinct. This tower bore armorial bearings,
which I was trying to decipher, when Verney came up with Janet. "Nothing
but those same arms of the Lascaris," he said.

"Why do you say 'nothing but'?" said Janet. "To be royal, and Greek, and
have three castles--for this is the third we have seen--is not nothing,
but something, and a great deal of something. How I wish _I_ had lived
in those days!"

As the Professor was not with us, we knew nothing of the story of
Gorbio, and walked about rather uncomfortable and ill-informed in
consequence. But it turned out that Gorbio, like the knife-grinder, had
no story. "Story? Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir." Inness,
however, had reserved one fact, which he finally delivered to us under
the great elm in the centre of the little plaza, where we had assembled
to rest. "This peaceful village," he began, "whose idyllic children now
form a gazing circle around us, was the scene of a sanguinary combat
between the French and Spanish-Austrian armies in 1746."

"Oh, modern! modern!" said Verney from behind (where he was throwing
Janet into Gorbio).

"Your pardon," said Inness, with majesty; "not modern at all. In 1746,
as I beg to remind you, even the foundation-stones of our great republic
were not laid, yet the man who ventures to say that it is not, as a
construction, abso