Much Of The Romance Of The Beautiful Towns And Villages On This Beautiful Road, Disappears When They Are Entered, For Many Of Them Are Very Miserable.

The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their

Wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or crooning together in by-corners, they are like a population of Witches--except that they certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument of cleanliness. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.

These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however: nestling, with their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill- sides, or built upon the brink of noble bays: are charming. The vegetation is, everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm- tree makes a novel feature in the novel scenery. In one town, San Remo--a most extraordinary place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble underneath the whole town--there are pretty terrace gardens; in other towns, there is the clang of shipwrights' hammers, and the building of small vessels on the beach.

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