of golden red. In clefts and crannies of the limestone Pteris Cretica flourished, and spikes of gentian. This Val di Nesso extends to the Pian di Tivano, as does Val Esino from Varenna to the Cainallo Pass, or the Val di Gravedona to the San Jorio Pass.

The boy Carlo hastened to join his companions in the joyous harvest time. The men beat the branches, the children gathered up the chestnuts from the ground, and the women carried them homeward in the baskets on their backs. Such was the hope of each year to the population, with rights of the commune over certain tracts to be respected, and property of families or individuals left untouched, while the poor followed as gleaners.

The chestnut-wood belongs to that upper realm of light, wind, and sunshine. Ah, the dear, beneficent chestnut trees of Italy, France, and Spain that feed so many hungry mouths! The benefactor of the human race who plants a tree must win paradise. How friendly, almost human in protection of shade, are the trunks rising straight

and symmetrical here, and bent or twisted by the storms and years there, if not fallen prone among the mosses, and lichen-covered rocks. A refuge to seek in all emergencies, the wood of Nesso extended the shelter of wide-spreading boughs in rain and heat to childhood, and even the deeper troubles of maturity, for women to sob away grief, soothed by the myriad rippling sounds of swaying foliage, and water, or manhood to wrestle with anger and revenge, and possibly conquer these terrible instincts.

In winter patches of snow lingered in the hollows amidst the dead leaves swept into billows by the storms. Spring decked the glades with green and gold, and gave to the bushes and chestnuts their blossoms, and first tufts of leaves. Then the soft unfolding of summer hours brought the ripened fruit of autumn, and all hearts rejoiced if the harvest was sound and abundant. Ah, the good chestnuts! Young Carlo knew their bounty to the land. Gathered in the wood, they were heaped on mats of cane, and smoke-dried over a fire, then shelled by beating together in a bag,

and ground to flour at the mill. How delicious to juvenile hunger the flour mixed with water, spread on dried chestnut-leaves, and baked between two heated stones in the mode of Lucca! Then the polenta, the fritters temptingly fried, and the great cake in a pan, on a three-legged stool, mingled with oil and spices, of a dark chocolate colour, the top powdered with flour, of which delicacy one bought a wedge-shaped slice. Carlo had only heard of these luxuries. The career of the chestnut-roaster, who quits his native canton Ticino with the first cold weather, to set up his little furnace on the street corners of Florence, Rome, or Genoa, and serve the nuts crisp and hot to pedestrians, is an enviable calling.

When the last group had departed, and the early nightfall shrouded the heights, the trees rustled and communed together in their own fashion. A patriarch, gnarled and twisted with years, yet still left standing, with a stanch hold of roots in the soil, remarked to the more vigorous generations, and the saplings ranged about:

"We have given man of our bounty another year. May the good food be blessed to his need. How they grow up, the children. The lad was fetched here in his cradle only the other spring, and he may become one of the old gleaners, in his time, never quitting the shadow of our branches. Who knows?"

The saplings laughed among themselves. They had not yet had their day.

"Time passes, and carries away everything," murmured the patriarch chestnut tree. Il tempo passa, e porta via ogni cosa. The generations of visitors come and go through the gates of Como, but the sunset glows on the surface of the waters, and the twilight gathers beneath the cliffs unchanged in the recurring years.

XXV

TRAGEDY IN SUNSHINE

N the year 1900, July the thirtieth was a Monday, soft, calm, and languid, with all the promise of midsummer heat in the morning hours after a night of storms. The lake world wore its most hushed, and even somnolent aspect of peaceful loveliness. The Como craft passed on the silvery current of the waters in a listless fashion. An early steamer glided from one shore to the other silently. The stranger, pausing in the shade of oleander, acacia, and palm on the bank to watch the black poodle take a bath in the limpid wavelets of the little pebbly beach below, was vaguely aware that these boats had no music and crowd of work-aday folk from Milan on board, out for a festa, but one flag trailing astern at half-mast.