s and the cypresses and _balze_. As
I leaned and mused, while Christian (my good friend and fellow-traveller
from the Grisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset flamed up from a
rampart of cloud, built like a city of the air above the mountains of
Volterra--fire issuing from its battlements, and smiting the fretted
roof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of celestial rose upon the
saddest purples and cavernous recesses of intensest azure.

We had an excellent supper in the visitor's refectory--soup, good bread
and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nice white
cheese made of sheep's milk, and grapes for dessert. The kind Abbate sat
by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping his tortoise-shell
snuff-box, and telling us many interesting things about the past and
present state of the convent. Our company was completed with Lupo, the
pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog, very good friends, and both
enormously voracious. Lupo in particular engraved himself upon the
memory of Christian, into whose large legs he thrust his claws, when the
cheese-parings and scraps were not supplied him with sufficient
promptitude. I never saw a hungrier and bolder cat. It made one fancy
that even the mice had been exiled from this solitude. And truly the
rule of the monastic order, no less than the habit of Italian gentlemen,
is frugal in the matter of the table, beyond the conception of northern
folk.

Monte Oliveto, the Superior told us, owned thirty-two _poderi_, or large
farms, of which five have recently been sold. They are worked on the
_mezzeria_ system; whereby peasants and proprietors divide the produce
of the soil; and which he thinks inferior for developing its resources
to that of _affito_, or lease-holding.

The contadini live in scattered houses; and he says the estate would be
greatly improved by doubling the number of these dwellings, and letting
the sub-divided farms to more energetic people. The village of Chiusure
is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor: a dower, for
instance, of fifty _lire_ is thought something: whereas near Genoa, upon
the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimes provide a dower of twenty
thousand _lire_. The country produces grain of different sorts,
excellent oil, and timber. It also yields a tolerable red wine. The
Government makes from eight to nine per cent upon the value of the land,
employing him and his two religious brethren as agents.

In such conversat