ething. Not so do I.

By daylight, on the way down from my little home to Rapallo, or up from
Rapallo home, I am indeed hardly conscious that this inn exists. By
moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to it. But
on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but a strip
of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door, great
always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean also will
be. And so I cleave to the present tense--the nostalgic present, as
grammarians might call it.

Likewise, when I say that thoroughly dark nights are rare here, I mean
that they are rare in the Gulf of Genoa. Clouds do not seem to like
our landscape. But it has often struck me that Italian nights, whenever
clouds do congregate, are somehow as much darker than English nights as
Italian days are brighter than days in England. They have a heavier and
thicker nigritude. They shut things out from you more impenetrably. They
enclose you as in a small pavilion of black velvet. This tenement is not
very comfortable in a strong gale. It makes you feel rather helpless.
And gales can be strong enough, in the late autumn, on the Riviera di
Levante.

It is on nights when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift
anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I
approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo
and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves and
zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first mile it
runs straight for three or four hundred yards; and, as the inn stands at
a point midway on this straight course, the Golden Drugget is visible to
me long before I come to it. Even by starlight, it is good to see. How
much better, if I happen to be out on a black rough night when nothing
is disclosed but this one calm bright thing. Nothing? Well, there has
been descriable, all the way, a certain grey glimmer immediately in
front of my feet. This, in point of fact, is the road, and by following
it carefully I have managed to escape collision with trees, bushes,
stone walls. The continuous shrill wailing of trees' branches writhing
unseen but near, and the great hoarse roar of the sea against the rocks
far down below, are no cheerful accompaniment for the buffeted pilgrim.
He feels that he is engaged in single combat with Nature at her
unfriendliest. He isn't sure that she hasn't supernatural allies working
wi