d more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer
who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed
me to weave a whole realistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so
out of season.

Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver
alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The
occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was
his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was without
moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to
a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who
was almost as exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled
contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and
yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it
was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed
at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for
in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an
unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon further acquaintance, that the man
paid a hundred dollars for the horse; his brother had paid a hundred and
twenty-five for the balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it
would be worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the
rising ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own
horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come from a
long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the next week
with two ladies for passengers, who were to pay him five dollars a day
for himself and horse and their joint keep. He said the ladies, whose
names he gave, were from Boston; he balked at adding Massachusetts, but
I am sure the horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to
carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would have gladly paid them five
dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was
charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even
upon his brother and his brother's horse: one of those perfect Italian
temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so
that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.

We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as
at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again,
we had the applause of the children in st