Momma wishes me to state that the word Italy, in any language, will for ever be associated in her mind with the journey from Genoa to Pisa.

We had our own lunch basket, so no baneful anticipation of cutlets fried in olive oil marred the perfect satisfaction with which we looked out of the windows.

One window, almost the whole way, opened on a low embankment which seemed a garden wall.

Olives and lemon trees grew beyond it and dropped over, and it was always dipping in the sunlight to show us the roses and the shady walks of the villas inside, white and remote; now and then we saw the pillared end of a verandah or a plaster Neptune ruling a restricted fountain area.

Out of the other window stretched the blue Gulf of Genoa all becalmed and smiling, with freakish little points and headlines, and here and there the white blossom of a sail.