'Ecco! la fattoria,' said the driver, pointing to it.

And once a strange group of underground dwellings, their chimneys level with the surrounding land, whence wild swarms of troglodyte children rushed up from the bowels of the earth to see the carriage pass and shriek for _soldi_.
But the beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches, where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets of gold beneath the dazzling sky.

Large hawks circled overhead; in the rare woods the nightingales were loud and merry; and goldfinches were everywhere.

A hot, lonely, thirsty land--the heart of Italy--where the rocks are honeycombed with the tombs of that mysterious Etruscan race, the Melchisedek of the nations, coming no one knows whence, 'without father and without mother'-- a land which has to the west of it the fever-stricken Maremma and the heights of the Amiata range, and to the south the forest country of Viterbo.
Eleanor looked out upon the road and the fields with eyes that faintly remembered, and a heart held now, as always, in the grip of that _tempo felice_ which was dead.
It was she who had proposed this journey.

Once in late November she and Aunt Pattie and Manisty had spent two or three days at Orvieto with some Italian friends.