as tired enough--having been standing all the way--when Grassina
was reached, for festivals six miles out of Florence at seven in the
evening disarrange good habits. But a few pence spent in the albergo
on bread and cheese and wine soon restored me. A queer cavern of a
place, this inn, with rough tables, rows and rows of wine flasks,
and an open fire behind the bar, tended by an old woman, from which
everything good to eat proceeded rapidly without dismay--roast chicken
and fish in particular. A strapping girl with high cheek bones and a
broad dark comely face washed plates and glasses assiduously, and two
waiters, with eyes as near together as monkeys', served the customers
with bewildering intelligence. It was the sort of inn that in England
would throw up its hands if you asked even for cold beef.

The piazza of Grassina, which, although merely a village, is
enterprising enough to have a cinematoscope hall, was full of
stalls given chiefly to the preparation and sale of cake like the
Dutch wafelen, and among the stalls were conjurors, cheap-jacks,
singers, and dice throwers; while every moment brought its fresh
motor-car or carriage load, nearly all speaking English with a nasal
twang. Meanwhile every one shouted, the naphtha flared, the drums beat,
the horses champed. The street was full too, chiefly of peasants,
but among them myriad resolute American virgins, in motor veils, whom
nothing can ever surprise; a few American men, sceptical, as ever,
of anything ever happening; here and there a diffident Englishwoman
and Englishman, more in the background, but destined in the end
to see all. But what I chiefly noticed was the native girls, with
their proud bosoms carried high and nothing on their heads. They at
any rate know their own future. No rushing over the globe for them,
but the simple natural home life and children.

In the gloom the younger girls in white muslin were like pretty
ghosts, each followed by a solicitous mother giving a touch here
and a touch there--mothers who once wore muslin too, will wear it no
more, and are now happy in pride in their daughters. And very little
girls too--mere tots--wearing wings, who very soon were to join the
procession as angels.

And all the while the darkness was growing, and on the hill where the
church stands lights were beginning to move about, in that mysterious
way which torches have when a procession is being mobilized, while
all the villas on the hills around ha