“And the butter, Junker, the butter!  We burn oil in lamps, and grease door-hinges with it, when they creak, but the Italians use it to fry chickens and fish.  Confound such doings!”

“Beware, Captain,” cried Wilhelm, “or I shall take you at your word and you’ll be obliged to pay my score for life.  Olive-oil is a pure, savory seasoning.”

“For a man that likes it.  I commend Holland butter.  Olive-oil has its value for polishing steel, but butter is the right thing for roasting and frying; so that’s enough!  But I beg you to hear me farther.  From Lombardy I went to Bologna, and then crossed the Apennines.  Sometimes the road ascended, then suddenly plunged downward again, and it’s a queer pleasure, which, thank God, we are spared in this country, to sit in the saddle going down a mountain.  On the right and left, lofty cliffs tower like walls.  Your breathing becomes oppressed in the narrow valleys, and if you want to get a distant view—­there’s nothing to be seen, for everywhere some good-for-nothing mountain thrusts itself directly before your nose.  I believe the Lord created those humps for a punishment to men after Adam’s fall.  On the sixth day of creation the earth was level.  It was in August, and when the noon sun was reflected from the rocks, the heat was enough to kill one; it’s a miracle, that I’m not sitting beside you dried up and baked.  The famous blue of the Italian sky!  Always the same!  We have it here in this country too, but it alternates with beautiful clouds.  There are few things in Holland I like better than our clouds.  When the rough Apennines at last lay behind me, I reached the renowned city of Florence.”

“And can you deny it your approval?” asked the musician.

“No, sir, there are many proud, stately palaces and beautiful churches and no lack of silk and velvet everywhere, the trade of cloth-weaving too is flourishing; but my health, my health was not good in your Florence, principally on account of the heat, and besides I found many things different from what I expected.  In the first place, there’s the river Arno!  The stream is a puddle, nothing but a puddle!  Do you know what the water looks like?  Like the pools that stand between the broken fragments and square blocks in a stonecutter’s yard, after a heavy thunder-shower.”

“The score, Captain, the score!”

“I mean the yard of a stone-cutter, who does a large business, and pools of tolerable width.  Will you still contradict me if I maintain—­the Arno is a shallow, narrow stream, just fit to sail a boy’s bark-boat.  It spreads over a wide surface of grey pebbles, very much as the gold fringe straggles over the top of Junker von Warmond’s fencing-glove.”

“You saw it at the end of a hot summer,” replied Wilhelm, “it’s very different in spring.”

“Perhaps so; but I beg you to remember the Rhine, the Meuse, and our other rivers, even the Marne, Drecht and whatever the smaller streams are called.  They remain full and bear stately ships at all seasons of the year.  Uniform and reliable is the custom of this country; to-day one way, to-morrow another, is the Italian habit.  It’s just the same with the blades in the fencing-school.”