Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 34 December 1886 to May 1887 . hegray olives were a less prevalent tone, amidthe tints of the peach and pear blossoms. Dan-delions thickly strewed the railroad-sides ; thegrass was powdered with the little daisies, TUSCAN CITIES. 905 white with crimson-tipped petals ; the garden-borders were full of yellow-flowering seed-turnips. The peasants were spading theirfields; as we ran along, it came noon, andthey began to troop over the white roads todinner, past villas frescoed with false balco-nies and casements, and comfortable brown-ish-gray farmsteads. On our
Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 34 December 1886 to May 1887 . hegray olives were a less prevalent tone, amidthe tints of the peach and pear blossoms. Dan-delions thickly strewed the railroad-sides ; thegrass was powdered with the little daisies, TUSCAN CITIES. 905 white with crimson-tipped petals ; the garden-borders were full of yellow-flowering seed-turnips. The peasants were spading theirfields; as we ran along, it came noon, andthey began to troop over the white roads todinner, past villas frescoed with false balco-nies and casements, and comfortable brown-ish-gray farmsteads. On our right the waves ofdistant purple hills swept all the way to Pistoja. under the lowering sky, with a locked-up cathe-dral, a bare baptistery, and a mediaeval publicpalace, and a history early merged in that ofFlorence; but to me it must always have thetender interest of the pleasure, patheticallyintense, which that young couple took in were very hungry, and they could getno breakfast in the drowsy town, not even acup of coffee; but they did not mind that;. I made it part of my business there tolook up a young married couple, Americans,journeying from Venice to Florence, whostopped at Pistoja twenty years before, andsaw the gray town in the gray light of a springmorning between four and six oclock. I re-membered how strange and beautiful theythought it, and from time to time I startedwith recognition of different objects — as if Ihad been one of that pair; so young, so sim-ple-heartedly, greedily glad of all that eld andstory which Italy constantly lavished uponthem. I could not find them, but I foundphantom traces of their youth in the ancienttown, and that endeared it to me, and madeit lovely through every hour of the long rainyday I spent there. To other eyes it might haveseemed merely a stony old town, dull and cold they wandered about, famished but blest, andby one of the happy accidents that usuallybefriended them, they found their way up tothe Piazza del Duomo a
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