he dignity
and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their
contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have
gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do.
We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go
thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were
but two parties besides our own--both, like ours, composed of but two
members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation.
"Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we
found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the Hotel Cavour in
Milan, which we had just left--one of the finest houses in Europe. There
is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower
of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed
that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away,
however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at
the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too
thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty;
which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people
who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every
direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble
slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why
does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about
it?"

[Illustration: COURTYARD OF HOUSE IN VERONA]

The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities,
is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the
train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town
sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines
and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing
Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then,
doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the
Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications
of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire,
followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the
mediaeval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth
century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of
the once