over the after
part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning
air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very
first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few
sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats,
such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake,
and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if
they had been so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of
sight at a theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them,
not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the
many-curving lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying
between lofty hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that
of a winding river,--like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval
wildness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the
tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into
Como, a pretty town nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a
villa, or else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. Many little
towns climb the heights half-way, and where the hills are green and
cultivated in vines or olives, peasants' houses scale them to the crest.
They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our starting-place farther
behind, and as we draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and
snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we
fancy it to have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that,
but for the efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the
dark below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in
the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,--out of which a marshy
stream oozes into the lake,--and on the snow-crowned hills upon the
left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the
indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at the
landing.

The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it
has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its
public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German
steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw
in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented
there to make it worth the while of a steamship comp