n _late_ evening is Summer-lightning--it
hangs in broad slow sheets, dropping from cloud to cloud, so long in
dropping and dying off. The 'bora,' which you only get at Trieste,
brings wonderful lightning--you are in glorious June-weather, fancy,
of an evening, under green shock-headed acacias, so thick and green,
with the cicalas stunning you above, and all about you men, women,
rich and poor, sitting standing and coming and going--and through all
the laughter and screaming and singing, the loud clink of the spoons
against the glasses, the way of calling for fresh 'sorbetti'--for all
the world is at open-coffee-house at such an hour--when suddenly there
is a stop in the sunshine, a blackness drops down, then a great white
column of dust drives straight on like a wedge, and you see the acacia
heads snap off, now one, then another--and all the people scream 'la
bora, la bora!' and you are caught up in their whirl and landed in
some interior, the man with the guitar on one side of you, and the boy
with a cageful of little brown owls for sale, on the other--meanwhile,
the thunder claps, claps, with such a persistence, and the rain, for a
finale, falls in a mass, as if you had knocked out the whole bottom of
a huge tank at once--then there is a second stop--out comes the
sun--somebody clinks at his glass, all the world bursts out laughing,
and prepares to pour out again,--but _you_, the stranger, _do_ make
the best of your way out, with no preparation at all; whereupon you
infallibly put your foot (and half your leg) into a river, really
that, of rainwater--that's a _Bora_ (and that comment of yours, a
justifiable pun!) Such things you get in Italy, but better, better,
the best of all things you do not (_I_ do not) get those. And I shall
see you on Wednesday, please remember, and bring you the rest of the
poem--that you should like it, gratifies me more than I will try to
say, but then, do not you be tempted by that pleasure of pleasing
which I think is your besetting sin--may it not be?--and so cut me off
from the other pleasure of being profited. As I told you, I like so
much to fancy that you see, and will see, what I do as _I_ see it,
while it is doing, as nobody else in the world should, certainly, even
if they thought it worth while to want--but when I try and build a
great building I shall want you to come with me and judge it and
counsel me before the scaffolding is taken down, and while you have to
make your way over