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One Sunday in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited. On that occasion he said to the village syndic: "Here I wish my bones to rest." The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga.

A knot of middle-aged gentlemen of sober dress and manner, gathered about a cabinet of fossils in the centre of this apartment, looked up at the entrance of the two friends; then the group divided, and Odo with a start recognised the girl he had seen on the road to the Superga. She bowed gravely to the young men.

At the Superga, for instance, all details of structure seem to have been effaced by the murky air, only a comparatively feeble ring of light being seen to encircle the moon. Elsewhere, a brilliant radiated formation was conspicuous, spreading at four opposite points into four vast luminous expansions, compared to feather-plumes or aigrettes.

Professor Beyrich confines the term "Miocene" to those strata which agree in age with the faluns of Touraine, and he has proposed the term "Oligocene" for those older formations called Lower Miocene in this work. In the hills of which the Superga forms a part there is a great series of Tertiary strata which pass downward into the Lower Miocene.

The early forenoon is the time to see it to the best possible advantage, which we were not fortunate enough to do, the heights being frequently enveloped in mist. Away to the south is the great hill called Superga, some 2000 feet above the sea.

The whole population woke up to the fact that surrender on this point involved surrender along all the line. The king, however, to whom the compromise appeared in the light of peace with the dead and with the living, with the Superga and with the Vatican, was very unwilling to yield. At the same time no one could be found to form a ministry.

The sun was near his setting; and his level rays, passing through fields of vapour, presages of storm, and shorn of the fiery brilliancy which is wont at eve to set these hills on a blaze, fell softly upon the dome of the Superga, and lighted up the white villas which stud the mountain by hundreds and hundreds throughout its whole extent.

Of this ancient sea the Adriatic forms the still unsilted portion. In other words, the great gulf which now stops short at Trieste and Venice once washed the foot of the Alps and the Apennines to the Superga at Turin, covering the sites of Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, Mantua, Cremona, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, and Novara.

I found that I had six hours to wait at Turin before the train left for Milan. My fleeting impression of Turin was of a very well-planned city, its Corsi spacious and well shaded with trees, its trams multitudinous, its many distant vistas of wooded hills and of the Superga Palace beyond the Po a delight to the eye.

The new king expressed to a deputation of the municipality of Turin with what pain he made the sacrifice which policy required. The policy of the revolutionary faction would not allow Victor Emmanuel to have his last resting-place with his ancestors at the Superga. Policy forbade that death even should liberate him who was called the liberator of Italy.