Everybody has read of the irreverent exclamation of the
Western youth, whose early education had been neglected,
when his teacher first showed him the letter A. I experi-
enced something of the same feeling when, on a bright
sunny morning towards the end of October, I first saw the
Leaning Tower of Pisa as the train from Spezia swept
past that quarter of the city where, together with the
Cathedral and the Baptistery, it stands in calm and
dignified repose. This piece of architectural eccentricity
was, and I suppose, still is, one of the commonplaces of
geography, and is put in the same educational state-room
with the wall of China and the Great Tun of Heidelberg.
I cannot recall the time when its form was not familiar to
me from models under glass-cases in "Early Victorian"
drawing-rooms, and from wood-cuts in the Mirror and the

14



THE JOURNEY : PISA

Penny and Saturday Magazines ; and now, here it was,
bodily before me ; no vision, no delusion, but a very de-
cided fact, with a most undeniable inclination on one side ;
so much so, that a nervous person would not sleep soundly
in the house that stands under its lee, on a windy night.
