y in Italian. Asked
in German. Reply in Italian. Asked in French, with the same result.
Other servants appeared, each with a piece of baggage. Other candles
were lighted. Everybody talked in chorus. The landlady--a woman of
elegant manners and great command of her native tongue--appeared with
a candle, and joined in the melodious confusion. What is the price
of these rooms? More jabber, more servants bearing lights. We seemed
suddenly to have come into an illumination and a private lunatic asylum.
The landlady and her troop grew more and more voluble and excited. Ah,
then, if these rooms do not suit the signor and signoras, there are
others; and we were whisked off to apartments yet grander, great suites
with high, canopied beds, mirrors, and furniture that was luxurious
a hundred years ago. The price? Again a torrent of Italian; servants
pouring in, lights flashing, our baggage arriving, until, in the tumult,
hopeless of any response to our inquiry for a servant who could speak
anything but Italian, and when we had decided, in despair, to hire the
entire establishment, a waiter appeared who was accomplished in all
languages, the row subsided, and we were left alone in our glory, and
soon in welcome sleep forgot our desperate search for a warm climate.

The next day it was rainy and not warm; but the sun came out
occasionally, and we drove about to see some of the sights. The first
Italian town which the stranger sees he is sure to remember, the outdoor
life of the people is so different from that at the North. It is the
fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the people sit in the
open market-place, shiver in the open doorways, crowd into corners
where the sun comes, and try to keep up the beautiful pretense. The
picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers were more interesting to us
than the palaces with sculptured fronts and old Roman busts, or tombs
of the Scaligers, and old gates. Perhaps I ought to except the wonderful
and perfect Roman amphitheater, over every foot of which a handsome
boy in rags followed us, looking over every wall that we looked over,
peering into every hole that we peered into, thus showing his fellowship
with us, and at every pause planting himself before us, and throwing a
somerset, and then extending his greasy cap for coppers, as if he
knew that the modern mind ought not to dwell too exclusively on hoary
antiquity without some relief.

Anxious, as I have said, to find the sunny So