on the
furrows from their tall straight figures. Then they turned to their
work again, and rhythmic movement was added to the picture. I wonder
when an Italian artist will condescend to pluck these flowers of beauty,
so abundantly offered by the simplest things in his own native land.
Each city has an Accademia delle Belle Arti, and there is no lack of
students. But the painters, having learned their trade, make copies ten
times distant from the truth of famous masterpieces for the American
market. Few seem to look beyond their picture galleries. Thus the
democratic art, the art of Millet, the art of life and nature and the
people, waits.

As we mount, the soil grows of a richer brown; and there are woods of
oak where herds of swine are feeding on the acorns. Monte Oliveto comes
in sight--a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, among
dishevelled earthy precipices, _balze_ as they are called--upon the hill
below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once a promising town;
but the life was crushed out of it in the throes of mediaeval civil wars,
and since the thirteenth century it has been dwindling to a hamlet. The
struggle for existence, from which the larger communes of this district,
Siena and Montepulciano, emerged at the expense of their neighbours,
must have been tragical. The _balze_ now grow sterner, drier, more
dreadful. We see how deluges outpoured from thunderstorms bring down
their viscous streams of loam, destroying in an hour the terraces it
took a year to build, and spreading wasteful mud upon the scanty
cornfields. The people call this soil _creta_; but it seems to be less
like a chalk than a marl, or _marna_. It is always washing away into
ravines and gullies, exposing the roots of trees, and rendering the
tillage of the land a thankless labour. One marvels how any vegetation
has the faith to settle on its dreary waste, or how men have the
patience, generation after generation, to renew the industry, still
beginning, never ending, which reclaims such wildernesses. Comparing
Monte Oliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil--with the
country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico--we perceive how
much is owed to the monks whom Bernardo Tolomei planted here. So far as
it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this is their service.

At last we climb the crowning hill, emerge from a copse of oak, glide
along a terraced pathway through the broom, and find ourselves in front
of the co