Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

nets for wrapping up the adversary, who, hit by a trident much, frequently die.  When the gladiator was deadly wounded, forsaking the arm, struck down and stretching the index, asked the people grace of life.  The spectators decided up his destiny, turning the thumb to the breast, or toward the ground.  The thumb turned toward the ground was the unlucky’s death doom, and he had without fail the throat cut off.”

Such, dimly but unmistakably seen through our Italian author’s well-reasoned English, were the ancient Pompeians; and, upon the whole, the visitor to their city could not wish them back in it.  I preferred even those modern Pompeians who followed us so molestively to the train with bargains in postal-cards and coral.  They are very alert, the modern Pompeians, to catch the note of national character, and I saw one of them pursuing an elderly American with a spread of hat-pins, primarily two francs each, and with the appeal, evidently studied from some fair American girl:  “Buy it, Poppa!  Six for one franc.  Oh, Poppa, buy it!”

I had again lavished my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had my Utah friend, who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to secure a first-class carriage.  “When I can’t go first-class in Italy, I’ll go home.”  I promptly and proudly agreed with him, but I concealed my morning’s experience of the fact that in Italy you may sometimes go second class when you have paid first.  I agreed with him, however, in not minding the plunder of Italian travel, since, with all the extortions, it would come to a third less than you expected to spend.  His was the true American spirit.

VI

ROMAN HOLIDAYS

I

HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS

“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” the traveller asks rather anxiously than defiantly when he finds himself a stranger in a strange place, and he is apt to add, if he has not written or wired ahead to some specific hotel, “Which of mine inns shall I take mine ease in?” He is the more puzzled to choose the more inns there are to choose from, and his difficulty is enhanced if he has not considered that some of his inns may be full or may be too dear, and yet others undesirable.

The run from Naples in four hours and a half had been so flattering fair an experience to people who had last made it in eight that they arrived in Rome on a sunny afternoon of January preoccupied with expectations of an instant ease in their inn which seemed the measure of their merit.  They indeed found their inn, and it was with a painful surprise that they did not find the rooms in it which they wanted.  There were neither rooms full south, nor over the garden, nor off the tram, and in these circumstances there was nothing for it but to drive to some one else’s inn and try for better quarters there.  They, in fact, drove to half a dozen such, their demands rising for more rooms and sunnier and quieter and cheaper, the fewer and darker and noisier and dearer were those they found.