hotly-contested one throughout, Healy and
Carroll and Baldwin and myself being the batteries, and was finally won
by the All-Americas, the score standing at 7 to 4 in their favor.

It was five o'clock and raining when we left Florence the next morning.
We had landed in Italy in a rain storm and we left the land of sunshine
and soft skies under the same unpleasant conditions.

CHAPTER XXIX. OUR VISIT TO LA BELLE FRANCE.

It was some days after we left the beautiful city of Florence, with its
wealth of statuary and paintings, before we again donned our uniforms,
the lack of grounds upon which we could play being the reason for our
enforced idleness. The day we left Florence we crossed over the border
and that night found us on French soil, and in the land of the
"parlevooers." The ride from Florence to Nice, which latter city was our
objective point, was one long dream of delight, the road running for
nearly the entire distance along the shores of the Mediterranean and
along the edge of high cliffs, at whose rocky bases waves were breaking
into spray that, catching the gleam of the sunlight, reflected all the
colors of the rainbow. Now and then the train plunged into the darkness
of a tunnel, where all was blackness, but as it emerged again the
sunlight became all the brighter by comparison. As we passed through
Pisa, a few hours out from Florence, we caught excellent view of the
famous leaning tower, with the appearance of which every schoolboy has
been made familiar by the pictures in his geography. At Genoa the train
stopped for luncheon and there Pfeffer's appetite proved to be too much
for him, and as he couldn't speak Italian he lingered so long at the
table as to get left, coming on in the next train a few hours
afterwards, and getting guyed unmercifully regarding his tremendous
capacity for storing away food.

In the course of the afternoon we passed through the the city of Diana
Maria, that four years before had been destroyed by an earthquake, in
which some four hundred people were killed or severely injured. It was a
desolate enough looking place as viewed from the car windows, the broken
walls that seemed ready to tumble at the slightest touch, and the bare
rafters all bearing witness to the terrible shaking up that the city had
received. Leaving Diana Maria we passed through some beautiful mountain
scenery, the little villages that clustered in the valleys looking from
our point of view like a collect