A Young Man Called Upon Me In A
Flood Of Tears Over The Loss Of His Grandmother, Of Whose Death At
The Age Of Ninety-Three He Had Just Heard.
I could do nothing with
him; I tried all the ordinary panaceas without effect, and was
giving him up in despair, when I thought of crossing him with the
well-known ballad of Wednesbury Cocking.
{7} He brightened up
instantly, and left me in as cheerful a state as he had been before
in a desponding one. "Chow" seems to do for the Italians what
Wednesbury Cocking did for my American friend; it is a kind of
small spiritual pick-me-up, or cup of tea.
From Rossura I went on to Tengia, about a hundred and fifty feet
higher than Rossura. From Tengia the path to Calonico, the next
village, is a little hard to find, and a boy had better be taken
for ten minutes or so beyond Tengia, Calonico church shows well for
some time before it is actually reached. The pastures here are
very rich in flowers, the tiger lilies being more abundant before
the hay is mown, than perhaps even at Fusio itself. The whole walk
is lovely, and the Gribbiasca waterfall, the most graceful in the
Val Leventina, is just opposite.
How often have I not sat about here in the shade sketching, and
watched the blue upon the mountains which Titian watched from under
the chestnuts of Cadore. No sound except the distant water, or the
croak of a raven, or the booming of the great guns in that battle
which is being fought out between man and nature on the Biaschina
and the Monte Piottino. It is always a pleasure to me to feel that
I have known the Val Leventina intimately before the great change
in it which the railway will effect, and that I may hope to see it
after the present turmoil is over. Our descendants a hundred years
hence will not think of the incessant noise as though of
cannonading with which we were so familiar. From nowhere was it
more striking than from Calonico, the Monte Piottino having no
sooner become silent than the Biaschina would open fire, and
sometimes both would be firing at once. Posterity may care to know
that another and less agreeable feature of the present time was the
quantity of stones that would come flying about in places which one
would have thought were out of range. All along the road, for
example, between Giornico and Lavorgo, there was incessant blasting
going on, and it was surprising to see the height to which stones
were sometimes carried. The dwellers in houses near the blasting
would cover their roofs with boughs and leaves to soften the fall
of the stones. A few people were hurt, but much less damage was
done than might have been expected. I may mention for the benefit
of English readers that the tunnels through Monte Piottino and the
Biaschina are marvels of engineering skill, being both of them
spiral; the road describes a complete circle, and descends rapidly
all the while, so that the point of egress as one goes from Airolo
towards Faido is at a much lower level than that of ingress.
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