ewhat different to different people. All,
however, agree in a general way about it.

I will tell you something of what two very different people have
reported, both of whom knew more about it, I believe, than Herodotus.
One of them speaks from his own experience, for he visited the country;
the other from the testimony of a young peasant girl who came back from
it for a month's visit to her friends. The former was a great Italian
of noble family, who died more than five hundred years ago; the latter a
Scotch shepherd who died not forty years ago.

The Italian, then, informs us that he had to enter that country through
a fire so hot that he would have thrown himself into boiling glass to
cool himself. This was not Diamond's experience, but then Durante--that
was the name of the Italian, and it means Lasting, for his books will
last as long as there are enough men in the world worthy of having
them--Durante was an elderly man, and Diamond was a little boy, and so
their experience must be a little different. The peasant girl, on the
other hand, fell fast asleep in a wood, and woke in the same country.

In describing it, Durante says that the ground everywhere smelt sweetly,
and that a gentle, even-tempered wind, which never blew faster or
slower, breathed in his face as he went, making all the leaves point one
way, not so as to disturb the birds in the tops of the trees, but, on
the contrary, sounding a bass to their song. He describes also a little
river which was so full that its little waves, as it hurried along, bent
the grass, full of red and yellow flowers, through which it flowed. He
says that the purest stream in the world beside this one would look as
if it were mixed with something that did not belong to it, even although
it was flowing ever in the brown shadow of the trees, and neither sun
nor moon could shine upon it. He seems to imply that it is always the
month of May in that country. It would be out of place to describe here
the wonderful sights he saw, for the music of them is in another key
from that of this story, and I shall therefore only add from the account
of this traveller, that the people there are so free and so just and so
healthy, that every one of them has a crown like a king and a mitre like
a priest.

The peasant girl--Kilmeny was her name--could not report such grand
things as Durante, for, as the shepherd says, telling her story as I
tell Diamond's--

"Kilmeny had been she k