Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/299

 "Not at home") if it hadn't been for the mourners coming to visit their dead. Oh, the pathos of them, with their sad, dark eyes, their heavy black draperies, and the flowers they were bringing to tell their loved ones that they were never forgotten! Instead of laughing, I came near crying. But the two moods are often so near together that one makes mistakes in their identity. The only fine and simple thing in the huge, strange place was the tomb of Mazzini.

I was tremendously impressed with the harbour at Genoa. It seemed so proud, as if Italy need have no shame to be represented by it, in the presence of all the crowding ships from all the ports of the world.

The morning was still young and fair when we rushed away along the Riviera di Levante; and even Aunt Mary was congratulating herself that we were on an automobile and not a train. For a while our road ran side by side with the rail; and whenever the coast was at its most exquisite, with some jutting headland over which we could skim like a bird, the wretched train had to go burrowing through the earth like a mole, all the glory and beauty shut out in murky darkness. I counted about fifty tunnels between Genoa and Spezzia. When we'd escaped from the suburbs of Genoa, and the last tall houses which made you afraid it might be their day to fall, we came upon visions as lovely as any we had seen in the French Riviera. Those gleaming towns set on curving bays of sapphire will always seem like dream-towns to me, unless I go back and prove their reality; especially Rapallo, which was the most beautiful of all. Jennie Harborough and her mother