So Reasonable Did This Seem, That About Two Years Ago It Was Resolved To Call In A Somnambulist Or Clairvoyant From Turin, Who, When He Arrived At The Spot, Became Seized With Convulsions, Betokening Of Course That There Was Treasure Not Far Off:

These convulsions increased till he reached the choir of the chapel, and here he swooned - falling down as if dead, and being resuscitated with apparent difficulty.

He afterwards declared that it was in this chapel that the treasure was hidden. In spite of all this, however, the chapel has not been turned upside down and ransacked, perhaps from fear of offending the saint to whom it is dedicated.

In the chapel there are a few votive pictures, but not very striking ones. I hurriedly sketched one, but have failed to do it justice. The hind saw me copying the little girl in bed, and I had an impression as though he did not quite understand my motive. I told him I had a dear little girl of my own at home, who had been alarmingly ill in the spring, and that this picture reminded me of her. This made everything quite comfortable.

We had brought up our dinner from S. Ambrogio, and ate it in what had been the refectory of the monastery. The windows were broken, and the swallows, who had built upon the ceiling inside the room, kept flying close to us all the time we were eating. Great mallows and hollyhocks peered in at the window, and beyond them there was a pretty Devonshire-looking orchard. The noontide sun streamed in at intervals between the showers.

After dinner we went "al cresto della collina" - to the crest of the hill - to use Signor Bonaudo's words, and looked down upon S. Giorio, and the other villages of the Combe of Susa. Nothing could be more delightful. Then, getting under the chestnuts, I made the sketch which I have already given. While making it I was accosted by an underjawed man (there is an unusually large percentage of underjawed people in the neighbourhood of S. Ambrogio), who asked whether my taking this sketch must not be considered as a sign that war was imminent. The people in this valley have bitter and comparatively recent experience of war, and are alarmed at anything which they fancy may indicate its recurrence. Talking further with him, he said, "Here we have no signori; we need not take off our hats to any one except the priest. We grow all we eat, we spin and weave all we wear; if all the world except our own valley were blotted out, it would make no difference, so long as we remain as we are and unmolested." He was a wild, weird, St. John the Baptist looking person, with shaggy hair, and an Andrea Mantegnesque feeling about him. I gave him a pipe of English tobacco, which he seemed to relish, and so we parted.

I stayed a week or so at another place not a hundred miles from Susa, but I will not name it, for fear of causing offence.

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