FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH T.B.ALDRICH BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 1891 B.^sTTU/? x&^lJTijfe. _ Cometl University Library D 919.A36 From Ponkapog to Pesth. 3 1924 028 082 158 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis bool< is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028082158 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. THOMAS BAILEY J\LDRICH FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: II East Seventeenth Street ^tK Stitaer^'ibe ^ve0, Camitiboe 188.1 Copyriglit, 1888, By T. B. ALDKICH. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Carnbridge : £lectrot?ped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. OOITTENTS. PAGE I. Peologue 7 n. Days with the Dead 13 in. Begsaes, Pbofessional and Amatettr .... 37 IV. Wats and Mannees 53 V. A Visit to a Ceetain Old Gentleman .... 71 VI. On a Balcony 117 vn. Smith 163 VIIL A Day in Afeica 195 rx. On Getting Back Again 261 As for thefe Obferuations which I now exhibite vnto thy gentle cenfure, take them I pray thee in good part till I prefent better vnto thee after my next trauels. ^ Coryat's Crudities. i6iz. I. PROLOGUE. FKOM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. PEOLOGUE. The reader -will probably not find Ponk- apog set down in any but tbe very latest gazetteer. It is tbe Indian name of a little New England village, from which the wri- ter sallied forth, a while ago, on a pilgrim- age beyond the sea. Ponkapog scarcely merits a description, and Pesth — ^the far- thest point east to which his wanderings led him — has been too often described. He is thus happily relieved of the onus of making strictly good the title of these papers, whose chief merit, indeed, is that they treat of neither Pesth nor Ponkapog. It was a roundabout road the writer took to reach the Hungarian capital — a road 10 FSOM PONKAFOG TO PESTH. that carried him as far north as Inverness, as far south as Naples, and left him free to saunter leisurely through Spain and spend a day in Africa. But the ground he passed over had been worn smooth by the feet of millions of tourists and paved three deep with books of travel. He was too wise to let anything creep into his note-book be- yond a strip of landscape here and there, a street scene in sepia, or an outline sketch of some custom or peculiarity that chanced to strike his fancy — and these he offers modestly to the reader. What is newest to one in foreign coun- tries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while. Neither an Italian, nor a French- man, nor a Saxon is worth travelling three thousand miles by sea to look upon. It is PROLOGUE. 11 Naples, and not the Neapolitan, that lin- gers in your memory. If your memory ac- cepts the Neapolitan, it is always with a bit of Renaissance architecture adhering to him, with a stretch of background that shall include his pathetic donkey, the blue bay, the sullen peak of Vesuvius, and gray Capri in the distance. If you could trans- port the man bodily to New York, the only thing left to do would be to drop him into the Hudson. He would be like Emerson's sparrow, that no longer pleased when he was removed from the context of sky and river. It is the details that attract or repel more than we are aware. How sensitive to details is the eye, unconsciously taking their stamp on its retina and retaining the im- pression foreve»! It is many a day since the writer was in the old walled town of Chester ; he does not recall a single feature of the hundreds of men and women he met in those quiet, gable-shadowed streets ; but on the door of a house there, in a narrow 12 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. court, was a grotesque bronze knocker whicli caught his eye for an instant in pass- ing : that knocker somehow screwed itself to his mind without his cognizance, and now at intervals, even after all these nights and days, it raps very distinctly on his memory. n. DAYS WITH THE DEAD. n. DATS WITH THE DEAD. I. They have a fashion across the water, particularly on the Continent, of making much of their dead. A fifteenth or a six- teenth century celebrity is a revenue to the church or town in which the distinguished ashes may chance to repose. It would be an interesting operation, if it were prac- ticable, to draw a line between the local reverence for the virtues of the deceased and that strictly mundane spirit which re- gards him as assets. The two are so nicely dovetailed that I fancy it would be quite impossible, ia most instances, to say where the one ends and the other begins. In the case of the good Cardinal Borro- meo, for example. The good cardinal died 16 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. in 1584. He is one of the loveliest figures in history. Nobly bom, rich, and learned, he devoted himself and his riches to holy deeds. The story of his life is a record of beautiful sacrifices and unselfish charities. Though his revenue was princely, his quick sympathies often left him as destitute as a Franciscan friar. His vast possessions finally dwindled to a meagre patrimony. During the great plague at Milan, in 1576, he sold what was left of his plate and fur- niture to buy bread for the famishing peo- ple. When he died, all Italy wept for him lite one pair of eyes. He lies in the crypt of the cathedral at Milan. It is dark down in the crypt; but above him are carvings and gUdings and paintings, basking in the mellow light sifted through the immense choir windows — " Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings." Above the fretted roof the countless " stat- ued pinnacles " lift themselves into the blue DATS WITS THE DEAD. 17 air. How magical all that delicate needle- work of architecture looks, by moonlight or sunlight ! " Milan, the chanting quires, The giant windows' blazoned fires. The height, the space, the gloom, the glory I A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! " When they show you the embalmed body of Borromeo — for it is really the body and not merely the sarcophagus they show you — the custode, a priest, lights the high candles on either side of the silver- encrusted altar. The cardinal's remains are kept in an hermetically-sealed case of rock crystal set within a massive oak coflOn, one side of which is lowered by a Tpndlass. There he lies in his jeweled robes, with his gloved hands crossed on his bosom and his costly crosier at his side, just as they laid him away in 1584. The features are wonderfully preserved, and have not lost the placid expression they wore when he fell asleep, — that look of dreamy serenity 18 FROM PONKAPOG TO FUSTS. peculiar to the faces of dead persons. The head is bald, and as black as ebony. There were services going on, the day we visited the cathedral. Above us the crowds came and went on the mosaic pavements, but no sound of the outside world penetrated to the dim, begemmed chapel where Carlo Borromeo, count, cardinal, and saint, takes what rest he can. We stood silent in the unflaring candlelight, gazing on the figure which had been so beloved in Milan three centuries ago. Presently the black-robed ' custode turned the noiseless crank, and the coffin side slowly ascended to its place. It was all very solemn and impressive — too impressive and too solemn altogether for so small a sum as five francs. I am but an intermittent worshiper of saints ; yet I have an ineradicable belief in good men like Carlo Borromeo, and, as he has long since finished his earthly tasks, I think it would be showing the cardinal greater respect to bury him than to exhibit BAYS WITH THE DEAD. 19 him. He nearly spoiled my visit to Milan. I resolved to have no further commerce with the dead, directly or indirectly. But the dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs' in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrim- age. You leave London with a distincter memory of the monuments in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's than of the turbu- lent streams of Kfe that surge through the Strand. Mr. Blank, to whom you bore a letter of introduction, is not so real a per- son to you as John Milton, whose grave you saw at St. Giles's, Cripplegate or De Foe, who sleeps in the melancholy Bunhill Fields Burial Ground. You catch yourself assisting, with strange relish, at the burn- ing of heretics at Smithfield. Eidley and Latimer stand before you in flesh and bone 20 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. and flame at Oxford. Thomas a Becket falls stabbed at your feet on the stone flag- gmg in Canterbury Cathedral. At Holy- rood, are not Darnley and pallid Ruthven in his steel corselet forever creeping up that narrow spiral staircase leading to the small cabinet where Rizzio is supping with the luckless queen? You cannot escape these things if you would. Your railway carriage takes you up at one famous grave and sets you down at another. Madrid is but a stepping-stone to the gloomy Escorial, with its underground library of gilded cof- fins — a library of royal octavos, one might say, for none but Spanish kings and queens are shelved there.^ In Paris, where the very atmosphere thrills with intense life, 1 Spanish post-mortem etiquette excludes the late Queen Mercedes from this apartment, as none but queens who have heen mothers of kings are allowed sanctuary here. On a shelf at the left of the entrance to the tomb, an empty sar- cophagus, of the same ornate pattern as the others, awaits Alfonso ni. It would probably not wait long for him if Spanish republicanism had its will. DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 21 you are brought at each step face to face with the dead. What people are these that flit iu groups up and down the bril- liant boulevards? They are not sipping absinthe and taking their ease — the poor ghosts, old and new! Can you stand in the Place de la Concorde and not think of the twenty-eight hundred persons who were guillotined there between 1793 and 1795? A few minutes' walk from the crowded cafSa leads you to the morgue, "the little Doric morgue," as Browning calls it. The golden dome of the Invalides keeps perpetually in your mind "the ter- ror of Europe," held down by sixty tons of porphyry, in the rotunda. The neatly- swept asphalt under your feet ran blood but yesterday. Here it was, near the Tui- leries, the insurgents threw up a barricade. Those white spots which you observe on the faqade of yonder building, the Made- leine, are bits of new stone set into the sacrilegious shot-holes. On the verge of 22 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. tlie city, and witliiii sound of its feverish heart-throb, stretch Pdre la Chaise and Montmartre and Mont Parnasse, pathetic with renowned names. I suppose that a taste for churchyards and cemeteries is a cultivated taste. At home they were entirely disconnected in my mind with any thought of enjoyment ; but after a month on the other side I pre- ferred a metropolitan graveyard to almost any object of interest that could be pre- sented to me. A cemetery at home sug- gests awkward possibilities ; but nothing of the kind occurs to you in rambling through a foreign burial-ground. As our gamins would say, it is not your funeral. You wander along the serpentine walk as you would stroll through a picture gallery. You as little think of adding a mound to the one as you would of contributing a painting to the other. You survey the monoliths and the bas-rehefs and the urns and the miniature Athenian temples from DAYS WITS THE DEAD. 23 the stand-point of an unbiased spectator who has paid his admittance fee and ex- pects entertainment or instruction. Some of the pleasantest hours I passed in sight- seeing were spent in graveyards. Among the most notable things we saw were the Jewish cemetery at Prague, with its smoky Gothic synagogue of the thirteenth cen- tury (the Altneuschule), and the ancient churchyaxd of St. John at Nuremberg, where Hans Sachs and many another wor- thy of his day lie at rest, and where the remains of Albrecht Diirer once rested — painter, poet, architect, and engraver, the master of almost everything except Mrs. Diirer. The engraved brass plates — the P. P. C. cards, so to speak, of the departed aristocracy of Nuremberg — on the horizon- tal slabs of St. John's are very quaint, with their crests, and coats-of-arms, and sym- bols of gentility. At Prague the stones are marked with pitchers and hands, to designate the descendants of the tribes of 24 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. Levi and Aaron. They claim to have one stone that dates as far back as A. D. 606. Some of the graves are held in great vener- ation; that of Rabbi Abignor Kara, who died in 1439, is often made the point of pilgrimage by Jews living in distant lands. Within the yard is a building where the funeral rites are performed, and grave- clothes are kept for all comers. The dead millionaire and the dead pauper are arrayed in the same humble garb, and alike given to earth in a rough board coffin. The Jew- ish custom, like death itself, is no respecter of persons. There is a fine austerity in this. SAYS WITS THE DEAD. 25 n. It was always more or less of a satisfac- tion to observe that the mortuary sculp- tures of the Old World were every whit as hideous as our own. The sepulchral de- signs in churches abroad are generally in the worst style of Middle Age realism. A half-draped skeleton of Death, plunging his dart into the bosom of some emaciated marble girl, seems to have been a consol- ing symbol to the survivors a few centu- ries ago. This ghastly fancy is constantly under your eyes. If I call it ghastly I give expression to the effect it produced on me at first. It would not be honest for me to affirm that I did not like it at last. I be- came so accustomed to this skeleton and his brother monstrosities that when we visited those three grim chambers under the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, 26 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. and saw the carefully polislied skulls of hundreds of monks wrought into piUars and arches and set upon shelves, I looked at them as complacently as if they had been a lot of exploded percussion-caps. "It is a pity they can't be used again," I thought ; and that was all. I began to believe the beautiful economy of nature to be greatly overrated. This is the burial-place of the Cappuc- cini, who esteem it a blissful privilege to lie here for a few years in consecrated earth brought from Jerusalem^ and then, when their graves are wanted for fresher brothers, to be taken up and transformed into architectural decorations. The walls and recesses and arched ceilings of these chapels (which are beneath the church but not under ground) are thus orna- mented with the brotherhood skillfully ar- ranged in fanciful devices, the finger-joints and the fragile links of the vertebral col- umn being wrought into friezes and light DATS WITH THE DEAD. 27 cornices, and the larger bones arranged in diamonds and hearts and rounds, like the sabres and bayonets in an armory. Here and there on the ceiling is a complete skeleton set into the plaster, quite sug- gestive of a cool outline by Flaxman or Eetzsch. The poor monks! they were not very ornamental in life ; but time is full of compensations. Death seems to have re- lieved them of one unhappy characteristic. " There is no disagreeable scent," says the author of The Marble Faun, describing this place, " such as might have been ex- pected from the decay of so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so unexceptionably." The Capuchin golgotha is more striking than the Roman or the Parisian catacombs, for the reason that its contracted limits do not allow you to escape from the least of its horrible grotesqueness. In the catacombs you are 28 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. impressed by their extent rather than by anything else. Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no to-day or to-morrow in Rome ; it is perpetual yesterday. One might lift up a handful of dust anywhere and say, with the Persian poet, " This was once man." Where everything has been so long dead, a death of to-day seems almost an im- pertinence. How quickly and with what serene irony the new grave is absorbed by the universal antiquity of the place ! The block of marble over Keats does not appear a day fresher than the neighboring Pyr- amid of Caius Cestius. Oddly enough, we saw no funeral in Rome. In almost every other large city it was our fate, either as we entered or departed, to meet a funeral cortege. Every one stands uncovered as the train crawls by, the vehicles come to a halt at the curbstone, the children stop their play, heads are bowed, golden locks DATS WITH THE DEAD. 29 and gray, on every side. As I have said, though in a different sense, they make much of their dead abroad. I was~ struck by the contrast the day we reached home. Driving from the steamer, we encountered a hearse straggling down Broadway. It attracted as much reverential regard as would be paid to an ice-cart. I happened to witness a picturesque funeral in Venice. It was that of a cho- rus-boy, in a church on one of the smaller canals somewhere west of the Rialto. I stumbled on the church accidentally that forenoon, and was not able to find it again the next day — a circumstance to which the incident perhaps owes the illusory at- mosphere that envelops it for me. The building had disappeared, like Aladdin's palace, in the night. They were performing a mass as I en- tered. The great rose window behind the organ and the chancel windows were dark- ened with draperies, and the colossal candles 30 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. were burning. The coffin, covered witli a heavily embroidered pall, stood on an ele- vated platform in front of the magnificent altar. The inlaid columns glistening in the candle-light, the smoke of the incense curl- ing lazily up past the baldachino to the frescoed dome, the priests in elaborate stoles and chasubles kneeling around the bier — it was like a masterly composed picture. When the ceremonies were concluded, the coffin was lifted from the platform by six young friars and borne to a gondola in waiting at the steps near the portals. The priests, carrying a huge golden, crucifix and several tall gilt torches, unlighted, crowded into the bow and stern of the floating hearse, which was attached by a long rope to another gondola occupied by oarsmen. Following these were two or three covered gondolas whose connection with the obsequies was not clear to me, as they appeared to be empty. Slowly down the narrow canal, in that dead stillness DAYS WITH THE DEAD. 31 which reigns in Venice, swept the sombre flotilla, bearing its unconscious burden to the Campo Santo. The air was full of va- grant spring scents, and the sky that arched over all was carved of one vast, unclouded sapphire. In the deserted church were two old crones scraping up the drippings of the wax candles from the tessellated pavement. Nothing except time is wasted in Italy. I saw a more picturesque though not so agreeable a funeral in Florence. The night of our arrival was one of those unearthly moonlight nights which belong to Italy. The Arno, changed to a stream of quick- silver, flowed swiftly through the stone arches of the Ponte Vecchio under our windows, and lured me with its beauty out- of-doors, though a great clock somewhere near by had just clanged eleven. By an engraving I had seen in boyhood I recog- nized the bridge of Taddeo Gaddi, with its goldsmith shops on either side. They were closed now, of course. I strolled across 32 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB. the bridge and back again, once or twice, and then wandered off into a network of dingy streets, traversed by one street so very narrow that you saw only a hand's breadth of amethystine sky between the tops of the tall buiLdiags. Standing in the middle of the thoroughfare, I could al- most touch the shutters of the shops right and left. At the upper end of the street, which was at least three quarters of a mile in length, the overhanging fronts of the lofty houses seemed to meet and shut out the dense moonlight. In the desper- ate struggle which took place there be- tween the moon and the gloom, a hun- dred fantastic shadows slipped from coigne and cornice and fell into the street below, like besiegers flung from the ramparts of some old castle. Not a human being nor a light was anywhere visible. Suddenly I saw what, for an instant, I took to be a falling star in the extreme distance. It approached in a zigzag course. It broke DAYS WITS THE DEAD. 33 into several stars ; these grew larger ; then I discoYered they were torches. A low mo- notonous chant, like the distant chorus of demons in an opera, reached my ear. The chant momently increased in distinctness, and as the torches drew nearer I saw that they were carried by fifteen or twenty per- sons marching in a square, in the middle of which was a bier supported by a number of ghostly figures. The procession was sweep- ing down on me at the rate of six miles an hour ; the training pall flapped in the wind caused by the velocity of the march. When the cortege was within twenty or thirty yards of me, I noticed that the trestle- bearers and the persons who held the flam- beaux were shrouded from forehead to foot in white sheets with holes pierced for the eyes. I never beheld anything more devil- ish. On they came, occupying the whole width of the narrow street. I had barely time to crowd myself into a projecting doorway, when they swept by with a rhyth- 34 FROM PONKAPOa TO PESTS. mical swinging gait, to the measure of their awful threnody. I waited until the muffled chant melted into the distance — and then I made a bee-line for the hotel. In Italy the hour of interment is grad- uated by the worldly position of the de- ceased. The poor are buried in the day- time ; thus the expense of torches is avoid- ed. Illuminated night-funerals are reserved for the wealthy and persons of rank. At least, I believe that such is the regulation, though the reverse of this order may be the case. At Naples, I know, the interments in the Campo Santo Vecchio take place a little before sunset. Shelley said of the Protestant Burying Ground at Rome that the spot was lovely enough to make one in love with death. Nobody would dream of saying that about the Campo Santo at Na- ples — a parallelogram of several hundred feet in length, inclosed on three sides by a high wall and on the fourth by an arcade. In this dreary space, approached through a DAYS WITS THE DEAD. 35 dismal avenue of cypresses, are three hun- dred and sixty-six deep pits, one of which is opened each evening to receive the dead of that day, and then sealed up — one pit for each day of the year. I conjecture that the extra pit must be for leap-year. Only the poorest persons, paupers and waifs, are buried here, if it can be called buried. The ^ody is usually left unattended at the ar- cade, to await its turn. There is a curious burial custom at Mu- nich. The law requires that every man, woman, and child who dies within city lim- its shall lie in sta,te for three days in the Leichenhaus (dead house) of the Gottes- acker, the southern cemetery, outside the Sendling Gate. This is to prevent any chance of premature burial, an instance of which, many years ago, gave rise to the present provision. The Leichenhaus is com- prised of three large chambers or salons, in which the dead are placed upon raised couches and surrounded by flowers. A 36 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. series of wide windows giving upon the ar- cade affords the public an unobstructed view of the interior. The spectacle is not so repellant as one might anticipate. The neatly-kept, well-lighted rooms, the profu- sion of flowers, and the scrupulous propri- ety which prevails in all the arrangements make the thing as little terrible as possible. On the Sunday of our visit to the Gottes- acker, the place was unusually full of bodies awaiting interment — old men and women, young girls and infants. Some were like exquisite statues, others like wax-figures, and all piteous. Attached to the hand of each adult was a string or wire connected with a bell in the custodian's apartment. It would be difficult to imagine a more startling sound than would be the sudden kling-kling of one of those same bells ! But I have been playing too long what Balzac calls a solo de eorhillard. m. BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. in. BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. There is one thing that sometimes comes near taking the joy out of the heart of foreign travel. It is one of those trifle.s which frequently prove a severer test to philosophy than calamities. In the East this thing is called bakhshish, in Germany trinkgeld, in Italy buonamano, ia France pourboire, in England — I do not know how it is called in England, but it is called for pretty often. In whatever soft, insidious syllable it may wrap itself, it is nothing but hateful. A piece of money which is not earned by honest service, but is ex- tracted from you as a matter of course by any vagabond who may start out of the bowels of the earth, like a gnome or a kobold, at the sound of your footfall, is a 40 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. shameless coin : it debases him that gives and him that takes. Everywhere on the Continent the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny, and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it. I say everywhere on the Continent; but, indeed, a man of or- dinary agiUty might walk over the greater part of Europe on outstretched palms. Rus- sians and Americans have the costly repu- tation of being lavish of money on their travels — the latter are pictured by the fervid Italian imagination as residing in gold-mines located in California and various parts of the State of New York — and are consequently favorites. The Frenchman is too artful and the Briton too brusque to cut up weU as victims. The Italian rarely ventures far from his accustomed flea, but when he does, like the German (who, on the other hand, is fond of travel- BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 41 ling), he voyages on a most economical basis. He carries off the unburnt candle- end, and his gratuities are homcBopathic. In spite of his cunning, I have no doubt — I should be sorry to doubt — that his own countrymen skin him alive. It is gratify- ing to be assured by Mr. Howells, in his Italian Journeys, that "these ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity as keen as that with which they devour strangers;" he is even "half per- suaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller of their own nation." Nevertheless, I stiU think that the privilege of being an American is .one of the most costly things in Europe. It is ever a large, though invisible, item in your account, whether you halt at a Pa- risian hStel or a snuffy posada in Catalo- nia. In neither place has the landlord the same excuse for extortion that was offered by the Ostend inn-keeper to the major- domo of George II., on one of his trips 42 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. from England to Hanover. "Are eggs scarce in Ostend?" inquired the major- domo, with supercilious eyebrows. "No," returned the honest landlord, "but kings are." Americans are not scarce anywhere. In Italy one is besieged by beggars, morning, noon, and night; a small coin generally suffices, and a modicum of good nature always goes a great way. There is something innocent in their deepest strat- egy, and something very winning in the amiability with which they accept the sit- uation when their villainy is frustrated. Sometimes, however, when the petitioner is not satisfied with your largess — as al- ways happens when you give him more than he expects — he is scarcely polite. I learned this from a venerable ex-sailor in Genoa. " Go, brigand ! " was the candid advice of that ancient mariner. He then fell to cursing my relatives, the family tomb, and everything appertaining to me — with my coin warming in his pocket. BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 43 It is fair to observe tliat the Italian beg- gar usually renders tribute to an abstract idea of manhood by assuming that he has done you some sort of service. This ser- vice is not generally visible to the unaided eye, and I fancy that the magnifying glass of sufficient power to enable you always to detect it has yet to be invented. But it is to his everlasting praise that he often does try to throw a veil of decency over the naked injustice of his demand, though he is too apt to be content with the thinnest of fabrics. I have paid a Neapolitan gen- tleman ten sous for leaning against a dead- wall in front of a hotel window. The un- expectedness and the insinuating audacity of the appeals frequently take away your presence of miad, and leave you limp. There was an old son of Naples who dwelt on a curb-stone near the Castell dell' Ovo. Stumbling on his private public residence quite unintentionally, one forenoon, I was immediately assessed. Ever after he 44 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. claimed me, and finally brought Ms son-in- law to me, and introduced him as a person combining many of the most desirable qual- ities of a pensioner. One of his strong points was that he had been accidentally carried off to America, having fallen asleep one day in the hold of a fruit vessel. "But, sir," I said, "why should I give you anything ? I don't know you." " That is the reason, signor." At bottom it was an excellent reason. If I paid the father-in-law for the pleasure of knowing him, was it not logical and just that I should pay the son-in-law for the much greater pleasure I had had in not knowing him ? The slightest thing will serve, in Italy, for a lien upon your exchequer. An urchin who turns himself into a Cath- erine-wheel at your carriage side, or stands on his head under the very hoofs of your horses, approaches you with the confidence of a prodigal son. A three-day-old nose- gay thrown into your lap gives a small BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 45 Italian maiden in one garment the right to cling to the footboard of your vettura until you reimburse her. In driving from Pom- peii to Sorrento, no fewer than fifty of these floral tributes will be showered upon you. The little witches who throw the flowers are very often pretty enough to be caught and sculptured. An inadvertent glance towards a fellow sleeping by the roadside places you at once in a false posi- tion. I have known an even less compro- mising thing than a turn of the eyelid to establish financial relations between the stranger and the native. I have known a sneeze to do it. One morning, on the Mole at Venice, an unassuming effort of my own in this line was attended by a most unex- pected result. Eight or ten yoimg raga- mufl&ns, who had been sunning themselves at a gondola-landing, instantly started up from a recumbent posture and advanced upon me in a semicircle, with '■'■Salute, signor, salute ! " One of these youths dis- 46 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTU. turbed a preconceived impression of mine by suddenly exclaiming, — '•' I am a boy Americano, dam ! " As I bad not come so far from home to relieve the necessities of my own country- men, and as I reflected that possibly this rogue's companions were also profane Amer- icani, I gave them nothing but a genial smile, which they divided among them mth the resignation that seems to be a na- tional trait. The transatlantic impostor, like Meph- istopheles, has as many shapes as men have fancies. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and sometimes he turns a hand-organ. Now he looks out at you from the cowl of a medi- ffival monk, and now you behold him in a white choker, pretending to be a verger. You become at last so habituated to seeing persons approach in formd pauperis, that your barber seems to lack originality when he "leaves it to your generosity," though he has a regular tariff for his local patrons. BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 47 He does not dare name a price in your case, though the price were four or five times above his usual rate, for he knows that you would unhesitatingly accept his terms, and his existence would be forever blighted by the reflection that he might have charged you more. These things, I repeat, cease to amaze one after a while, though I plead guilty to a new sensation the day a respectable Vien- nese physician left it to my generosity. I attempted to reason with Herr Doctor Scheister, but quite futilely. No, it was so he treated princes and Americans. It was painful to see a member of a noble pro- fession, not to say the noblest, placing him- self on a level with grooms and barbers and venders of orange-wood walking-sticks. But the intelligent Herr Doctor Scheister was content to do that. In many cities the street beggar is under the strict surveillance of the police; yet there is no spot in Europe but has its 48 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB. empty palm. It is only in Italy, however, tliat pauperism is a regular branch of in- dustry. There it has been elevated to a fine art. Elsewhere it is a sordid, clumsy make-shift, with no joy m it. It falls short of being a gay science in France or Germany, or Austria or Hungary. In Scot- land it is depressing, in Spain humiliating. In Spain the beggar is loftily condescend- ing ; he is a cahallero, a man of sangre azul, and has his coat-of-arms, though he may have no arms to his coat, caramba! In order to shake him off you are obliged to concede his quality. He will never leave you until his demand is complied with, or until you say, "Brother, for the love of God, excuse me ! "' and then the rogue de- parts with a careless " God go with you ! " He is precisely the person whom you would not be anxious to meet in a deserted calle after nightfall, or by daylight in a pass of the Guadarrama. The guide-books give disheartening accounts of mendicancy in BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 49 Ireland ; but that must be in the interior. I saw nothing of it along the coast, at Dub- lin and Cork. I encountered only one beg- gar in Ireland, at Queenstown, who retired crest-fallen when I informed him in Eng- lish that I was a Frenchman and didn't vmderstand him. " Thrue for ye," he said ; " bad 'cess to me, what was I thinkin' ov ! " On the rising and falling inflection of that brogue I returned to America quite independently of a Cunard steamer. I had to call the man back and pay my passage. In England you are subjected to a dif- ferent kind of extortion. There are beg- gars enough and to spare in the larger cities ; but that is not the class which preys upon you in Merrie England. It is the middle-aged housekeeper, the smart cham- bermaid, the elegiac waiter and his assist- ant, the boy in buttons who opens the hall door, the frowzy subterranean person called 4 50 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTE. Boots, the coacliman, the ostler, and one or two other individuals whose precise rele- vancy to your affairs will always remain a pleasing mystery to you, but who never- theless stand in a line vsdth the rest in the hall of the wayside inn, at your departure, and expect a gratuity. They each look for a fee ranging from two to ten shillings sterling, according to the length of your sojourn, though a very magnificent charge for attendance has already been recorded in your bill, which appears to have been drawn up by an amateur mathematician of somewhat uncertain touch as yet in the in- tricate art of addition. The English cousin of the American workingman, who would feel inclined to knock you down if you offered him money for telling you the time of day, will very placidly pocket a fee for that heavy service. In walking the streets of London you never get over your astonishment at that eminently respectable person in black — BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR. 51 your conjecture makes him a small curate or a tutor in some institution of learning — M'ho, after answering your trivial question, takes the breath out of you by suggesting his willingness to drink your 'ealth. On the whole, I am not certain that I do not prefer the graceful, foliage-like, vagabond ways of Pietro and Giuliana to the icy mendicity of Jeemes. IV. WAYS AND MANNERS. IV. WAYS AND MANNERS. I ONCE asked an American friend, who had spent half his life in foreign travel, to tell me what one thing most impressed him in his various wanderings. I supposed that he was going to say the Pyramids or the Kremlin at Moscow. His reply was, " The politeness and consideration I have met with from every one except travelling Eng- lishmen and Americans." I was afterwards told by an impolite per- son that this politeness was merely a sur- face polish ; but it is a singularly agreeable sort of veneer. Some one says that if any of us were peeled, a savage would be found at the core. It is a very great merit, then, to have this savage wrapped in numerous folds, and rendered as hard to peel as possi- ble. For the most part, the pilgrim abroad 56 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. comes in contact with only the outside of men and things. The main point is gained if that outside is pleasant. The American at home enjoys a hundred conveniences which he finds wanting in the heart of European civilization. Many mat- ters which we consider as necessities here are regarded as luxuries there, or not known at all. A well-appointed private house in an American city has perfections in the way of light, heat, water, ventilation, draia- age, etc., that are not to be obtained even in palaces abroad; indeed, a palace is the last place in which they are to be looked for. The traveller is constantly amused by the primitive agricultural implements which he sees employed in some parts of France, Italy, and Germany, by the ingenuous de- vices they have for watering the streets of their grand capitals, and by the strange dis- regard of economy in man-power in every- thing. A water-cart in Berlin, for illustra- tion, requires three men to manage it : one WAYS AND MANNESS. 57 to drive, and two on foot behind to twitch right and left, by means of ropes, a short hose with a sprinkler at the end. " I wondered what they would be at Under the lindens." This painful hose, attached to a chubby Teutonic-looking barrel, has the appearance of being the tail of some wretched nonde- script animal, whose sufferings would in our own land invoke the swift interposition of the humane. That this machine is wholly inadequate to the simple duty of sprinkling the street is a fact not perhaps worth men- tioning. The culinary utensils of Central Germany are, I venture to say, of nearly the same pattern as those used by Eve — judging by some earthenware and iron- mongery of which I caught a glimpse in the kitchen of the Rothe Ross at Nurem- berg. I saw in Tuscany a wheelbarrow that must have been an infringement of an Egyptian patent of 500 B. c. I forget in what imperial city it was I beheld a tin 58 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. bath-tub shamelessly allowing itself to be borne, from door to door and let out by the job. In several respects the United States are one or two centuries in advance of the Old World ; but in that little matter of ve- neering I have mentioned, we are very far behind her. The incivility which greets the Amer- ican traveller at every stage in his own domains is so rare an accomplishmeiit among foreign railway, steamboat, and ho- tel officials that it is possible to journey from Dan to Beersheba — certainly from Ponkapog to Pesth — without meeting a single notable instance of it. I thuik that the gentlemen of the Dogana at Ventuni- glia were selected expressly on account of their high breeding to examine luggage at that point. In France — by France I mean Paris — even the drivers of the public car- riages are civil. Civilization can go no further. If Darwin is correct in his theory of the survival of the fittest, there wiU WAYS AND MANNERS. 59 ultimately not be a single specimen of the genus left anywhere in America. We shall have to import Parisians. I am not posi- tive but we shall also run short of railway conductors and ticket-sellers. We have persons occupying these posts here who could not hold similar positions in Europe fifteen mintites. The guard who has charge of your car- riage, on a Continental railway, so far from being the disdainful autocrat who on our own cars too often snatches your ticket from you and snubs you at a word, is the most thoughtful and considerate of men; he looks after the welfare and comfort of your party as if that were the specialty for which he was created ; he never loses coun- tenance at your daring French or German, or the graceful New England accent you throw upon your Italian ; he is ready with the name of that ruined castle which stands like a jagged tooth in the mouth of the mountain gorge ; he does not neglect to tell 60 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. you at what station you may find an excel- lent buffet; you cannot weary him with questions; he will smilingly answer the same one a hundred times ; and when he is killed in a collision with the branch train, you are not afraid to think where he will go, with all this kindliness. I am convinced that it is the same per- son, thinly disguised as the proprietor of a hotel, who receives you at the foot of the staircase as you step down from the omni- bus, and is again the attentive and indefati- gable chamberlain to your earthly comfort. It is an old friend who has been waiting for you these many years. To be sure, as the proprietor of a hotel the old friend makes . you pay roundly for all this ; but do you not pay roundly for food and shelter in tav- erns on your native heath, and get no civil- ity whatever, unless the hotel-clerk has lost his mind? Your Continental inn-keeper, of whatever nationality, keeps a paternal eye on you, and does not allow you to be WATS AND MANNERS. 61 imposed upon by rapacious outsiders. If you are to be imposed upon, he attends to that trifling formality himself, and always graciously. Across three thousand miles of sea and I know not how many miles of land, I touch my hat at this moment to the landlord of that snuffy little hostelry at Wittenberg, who awoke me at midnight to excuse himself for not having waited upon us in person when we arrived by the ten o'clock train. He had had a card-party — the Herr Professor Something-splatz and a few friends — in the coffee-room, and reaUy, etc., etc. He couldn't sleep, and didn't let me, until he had made his ex- cuses. It was downright charming in you, mine host of the Goldner Adler ; I thank you for it, and I 'd thank you not to do it again. Every American who has passed a week ' in rural England must have carried away, even if he did not bring with him, a fond- ness for our former possessions. The solid 62 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. hospitality he has received at the comfort- able old inns smothered in leaves and mosses by the roadside is sure to figure among his pleasantest reminiscences. It lies in his recollection with Stratford and Can- terbury and Grasmere ; as he thinks of it, it takes something of the picturesqueness of those ivy-draped abbeys and cathedrals which went so far to satisfy his morbid appetite for everything that is wrinkled and demolished in the way of architecture. It was Shenstone who said, — " Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, Whate'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think.he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn." The foreign traveller vdll scarcely be in- clined to sigh over that. If he is, he vsdll have cause to sigh in many an English vil- lage and in most of the leading cities across the Channel. I know of one party that can think with nothing but gratitude of their reception at the hotel , one raw April WAYS AND MANNERS. 63 night, after a stormy passage from Dover to Calais and a cheerless railway ride thence to Paris. Rooms had been bespoken by tel- egraph, and when the wanderers arrived at the Rue de Rivoli they found such exquisite preparation for their coming as seemed to have been made by well-known gentle hands reaching across the Atlantic. In a small salon adjoining the parlor assigned to the party, the wax candles threw a soft light over the glass and silver appoint- ments of a table spread for their repast. A waiter arranging a dish of fruit at the buffet greeted them with a good evening, as if he had been their servitor for years, instead of now laying eyes upon them for the first time. In the open chimney- place of the parlor was a wood fire blazing cheerfully on the backs of a couple of brass griffins who did not seem to mind it. On the mantel-piece was an antique clock, flanked by bronze candlesticks that would have taken your heart in a bric-a-brac shop. 64 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. The furniture, the draperies, and the hun- dred and one nicknacks lying around on tables and etageres, showed the touch of a tasteful woman's hand. It might have been a room ia a ch&teau. It was as unUke as possible to those gaudy barracks — fitted up at so much per yard by a soulless up- holsterer — which we call parlors in our own hotels. Beyond this were the sleepmg apartments, in the centre of one of which stood the neatest of femmes de ehambre, with the demurest of dark eyes, and the pinkest of ribbons on her cap. She held ia her hand a smaU copper pitcher of hot water, and looked likie Liotard's pretty paiutiag of the Chocolate Girl come to life. On a toilette-table under a draped mirror was a slender vase of Bohemian glass holding two or three fresh tea-roses. What beau of the old regime had slipped out of his sculptured tomb to pay madam that gallantry? Outside of the larger cities on the Con- WATS AND MANNERS. 65 tinent you can get as wretched accommoda- tions as you could desire for an enemy. In most of tlie German and Italian provinces, aside from tlie main routes of travel, the inns are execrable ; but the people are in- variably courteous. I hardly know how to account for the politeness which seems to characterize every class abroad. Possibly it is partly explained by the military sys- tem which in many countries requires of each man a certain term of service ; the soldier is disciplined in the severest school of manners ; he is taught to treat both his superior and his inferior with deference ; courtesy becomes second nature. Certainly it is the rule, and not the exception, among Continental nations. From the threshold of a broken-down chalet in some loneliest Alpine pass you will be saluted graciously. You grow skeptical as to that " rude Carin- thian boor " who, in Goldsmith's poem, " Against the houseless stranger shuts the door. " No French, Italian, or Saxon gentleman, 5 66 FROM FONKAPOG TO PESTB. SO far as I liave observed, enters or leaves a caf d of tlie better class witbout lifting his hat, especially if there are ladies present. As he hurries from the railway carriage at his station — a station at which the train halts for perhaps only a few seconds — he seldom neglects to turn on the step and sa- lute his fellow-passengers. It is true, for the last hour or two he sat staring over the top of his journal at your wife or sister; but to be a breaker of the female heart is what they all seem to aspire to, over there. It appears to be recognized as not ni-bred to stare at a lady so long as there is any- thing left of her. It is in that fashion that American ladies are stared at by French- men and Germans and Italians and Span- iards, who, aside from this, are very pohte to our countrywomen — marvellously polite when we reflect that the generaUty of un- travelled foreigners, beyond the Straits of Dover, regard us, down deep in their hearts, as only a superior race of barbarians. fVAYS AND MANNERS. 67 They would miss us sadly if we were to become an extinct race. Not to mention other advantages resulting from our exist- ence, out desire to behold their paintings and statuary and the marvels of their archi- tecture — to which they them&elves are for the most part only half alive, especially in Italy — keeps a thousand of their lovely, musty old towns from collapsing. They understand this perfectly, and do whatever lies within them to interest us ; they are even so obliging as to invent tombs and his- toric localities for our edification, and come at last to believe iu them themselves. In that same Wittenberg of which I have spoken, they will show you the house of Hamlet ! and at Ferrara, a high-strung sym- pathetic valet-de-place, if properly encour- aged, will throw tears into his voice as he stands with you in a small cellar where by no chance is it probable that Tasso was immured for seven years, or even seven minutes. Prigione di Tasso ! I have as 68 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. genuine a prison of Tasso at Ponkapog. Though, their opinion of our intelligence is not always as flattering as we could wish, it shall not prevent me from saying that these people are the most charming and courteous people on the globe, and that I shall forget the Madonna at Dresden, the Venus in the Louvre, and the Alhambra as I saw it once by moonlight, before I for- get an interview I witnessed one day in the Rue de I'fecole de Medecine, between a fat, red-faced concierge and a very much battered elderly French gentleman, whose redingote, buttoned closely up to his chin, threw vague but still damaging suspicions on his supply of linen. " Pardon, madame," said the decayed old gentleman, lifting his threadbare sUk hat by its curled brim with indescribable grace as he approached, " is M. , . . Avithin ? " " I think not, but I will see." " I am pained " (Je suis dSsoW) " to give you the trouble." WATS AND MANNERS. 69 "It is no trouble, monsieur." " Merei, madame." The concierge disappeared. Presently slie returned, loaded to the muzzle with the information that M. . . . was unfortunately not at home. " A thousand pardons, madame, but will you have the amiability to give him this " (presenting a card that had seen better days) " as soon as he returns ? " " Certainly, monsieur." "Madame, I am sensible of your kind- ness." " Do not speak of it." " Bonjour, madame." " Bonjour, monsieur." This poor gentleman's costume was very far on its way to a paper-mill ; but adver- sity had left his manners intact, and they were fit for palaces. A VISIT TO A CERTAIN OLD GENTLEMAN. V. A VISIT TO A CERTAIN OLD GENTLEMAN. I. It was only after the gravest considera- tion that we decided to visit a Certain Old Gentleman. There were so many points to be considered. It was by no means cer- tain that a Certain Old Gentleman wanted us to visit him. Though we knew him, in a vague way, to be sure — through friends of ours who were friends of his — he did not know us at all. Then he was, accord- ing to report, a very particular old gentle- man, standing squarely on his dignity, and so hedged about by conventional ideas of social etiquette, so difficult of approach, and so nearly impossible to become acquainted with when approached, that it was an au- dacious thing seriously to contemplate drop- 74 FROM PONKAPOG TO FESTH. ping in on him familiarly. What impelled us to wish to do so ? Certainly we had no desire to pay court to him. He had for- merly occupied a high official position, but now he was retired, in a manner, into pri- vate life — a sufficient reason in itseK why he should be let alone. In brief, there were a hundred reasons why we should not visit him, and there was not one why we should. It was that that decided us, I think. It comes back to me like the reminis- cence of a dream, rather than as the mem- ory of an actual experience, that May after- noon when the purpose first unfolded itself to us. We were sitting in the fading glow of the day on the last of the four marble steps which linked our parlor to the fairy- like garden of the Albergo di Russia in the Via Babuino. Our rooms were on the ground-floor, and this garden, shut in on three sides by the main building and the wings of the hotel, and closed at the rear A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 75 by the Pincian Hill, up which the garden clambered haK-way in three or four luxu- riant terraces, seemed naturally to belong to our suite of apartments. All night we could hear the drip of the fountain among the cactus leaves, and catch at intervals the fragrance of orange-blooms, bloAvn in at the one window, we dared leave open. It was here we took the morning air a few min- utes before breakfast ; it was on these steps we smoked our cigar after the wonders of the day were done. We had the garden quite to ourselves, for the cautious tourist had long since taken wing from Rome, frightened by the early advance of sum- mer. The great caravansary was nearly empty. Aside from the lizards, I do not recollect seeing any living creature in that garden during our stay, except a little frowsy wad of a dog, which dashed into our premises one morning, and seizing on a large piece of sponge made off with it up the Pincian Hill. If that sponge fell to 76 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. tlie lot of some time-encrusted Romanese, and Providence was merciful enougli to in- spire him with a conception of its proper use, it cannot be said of the little Skye ter- rier that he lived in vain. If no other feet than ours invaded those neatly-gravelled walks, causing the shy, sil- very lizards to retreat swiftly to the bor- ders of the flower-beds or behind the cor- pulent green tubs holding the fan-palms, we were keenly conscious now and then of being overlooked. On pleasant afternoons lines of carriages and groups of gayly- dressed people went winding up the steep road which, skirted with ilexes and pines and mimosa bushes, leads to the popular promenade of the Pincio. There, if any- where, you get a breath of fresh air in the heated term, and always the most magnifi- cent view of the city and its environs. There, of old, were the gardens of Lucul- lus ; there Messalina, with sinfiil good taste, had her pleasure-house, and held her Satur- A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 77 nalia ; and there, to-day, the band of Vic- tor Emmanuel plays twice a week in the sunset, luring thither all the sunny belles and beaux of Rom.e. Monte Pincio, as I have said, sloped down on one side to our garden. On the crest of the hill command- ing our demesne was a low wall of masonry. From time to time a killing Roman fop would come and lean in an elegant attitude against this wall, nursing himself on the ivory ball of his cane, and staring unblush- ingly at the blonde-haired lady sitting un- der her own hired fig-tree in the hotel gar- den. What a fascinating creature he was, with his little black mustache, almost as heavy as a pencil mark, his olive skin, his wide, effeminate eyes, his slender rattan figure, and his cameo sleeve-studs ! What a sad dog he was, to melt into those lan- guishing postures up there, and let loose all those facile blandishments, careless of the heart-break he must inevitably cause the simple American signora in the gar- 78 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB den below ! We used to glance up at this gilded youth, from time to time, and it was a satisfaction to reflect what an ineffable idiot he was, like all his kind in every land under the sun. This was our second sojourn in Rome, and we had spent two industrious weeks, picking up the threads of the Past, dropped temporarily in April in order to run down and explore Naples before Southern Italy became too hot to hold us : two busy weeks, into which were crowded visits to the cata- combs and the Baths of Caracalla, and ex- cursions on the Campagna — at this time of year a vast red sea of poppies strewn with the wrecks of ancient tombs ; we had humiliated our nostrils in strolling through the Ghetto, and gladdened our eyes daily with the bronze equestrian statue of Mar- cus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campido- glio ; we had made a pilgrimage to the Ab- bey aUe Tre Fontane, and regarded with a proper sense of awe the three fountains A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 79 which had gushed forth at the points where the head of the Apostle Paul landed, in those three eccentric leaps it accomplished after his execution; we had breathed the musky air of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Basilica San Paolo, and once, by chance, on a minor fete day, lighted on a pretty pageant in St. John Lateran; we had looked our fill of statuary and painting, and jasper and lapis-lazuli ; we had bur- rowed imder the Eternal City in crypt and dungeon, and gazed down upon it from the dizzy Lantern of St. Peter's. The blight- ing summer was at hand ; the phantasmal malaria was stalking the Campagna at night : it was time to go. There was noth- ing more to be done in Rome unless we did the Roman fever — nothing but that, in- deed, if we were not inclined to pay a visit to a Certain Old Gentleman. This alter- native appeared to have so many advan- tages over the Roman fever that it at once took the shape of an irresistible temptation. 80 FBOM PONKAFOG TO PESTS. At least it did to Madama and me, but the other pilgrim of the party was of a more reflective mind, and was disposed to look at the question judicially. He was not going to call on a Certain Old Gentleman as if he were a frescoed panel in the Sistine Chapel ; it was not fair to put a human be- ing on the same footing as a nameless heathen statue dug out of the cinders of Pompeii ; the statue could not complain, and would be quite in the wrong if it did complain, at being treated as a curiosity; but the human being might, and had a per- fect right to protest. H 's objections to the visit were so numerous and so warmly put, that Madama and I were satisfied that he had made up his mind to go. " However, the gentleman is not adverse to receiving strangers, as I understand it," said H , imperceptibly weakening. " On the contrary," I said, " it is one of the relaxations of his old age, and he is es- pecially hospitable to our countrymen. A great many Americans " — A VISIT TO Alf OLD GENTLEMAN. 81 " Then let us go, by all means," inter- rupted Madama. "Among the Romans one should do — as Americans do." " Only much better," I suggested. " I have sometimes been not proud of my coun- trymen on this side of the water. The De- laneys in the Borghese Gallery, the other day ! I almost longed for the intervention of the Inquisition. If it had been in Ven- ice and in the fifteenth century, I 'd have dropped an anonymous communication into the letter-box of the Palace of the Doges, and had the Council of Ten down on Miss Fanny Delaney in no time." " The chances are he is out of town," said Madama, ignoring my vindictiveness. " He has a summer residence near Al- bano," said H , "but he never goes there now ; at least he has not occupied the viUa for the last few years, in fact, not since 1870." "Where does he pass his summers, then ? " asked Madama. 6 82 FROM PONKAPOG TO FESTH. " In Rome." " How eccentric ' " " I suppose lie has his weak points, like the rest of us," said H , charitably. " He ought to have his strong points, to endure the snminer in Rome, with the ma- laria, and the sirocco, and the typhoon, and all the dreadful things that befall." " The typhoon, my dear " — Though the discussion did not end here that May evening on the steps of the hotel- garden, it ends here in my record ; it being sufficient for the reader to know that we then and there resolved to undertake the visit in question. The scribe of the party dispatched a note to Signor V express- ing a desire to pay our respects to his ven- erable friend before we left town, and beg- ging that an early day, if any, be appointed for the interview. Signor V was an Italian acquaintance of ours who carried a diplomatic key that fitted almost any lock. We breakfasted betimes, the next morn- A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 83 ing, and sat lingering over our coffee,- await- ing Signor V 's reply to our note. The reply had so impressive an air of not com- ing, that we fell to planning an excursion to Tivoli, arid had ordered a carriage to that end, when Stefano appeared, bearing an envelope on his silver-plated waiter. (I think Stefano Avas born with that waiter in his hand ; he never laid it down for a mo- ment ; if any duty obliged him to use both hands, he clapped the waiter under his arm or between his knees ; I used to fancy that it was attached to his body by some myste- rious, invisible ligament, the severing of which would have caused his instant disso- lution.) Signor V advised us that his venerable friend would be gracious enough to receive us that very day at one half-hour after noon. In a postscript the signor in- timated that the gentlemen would be ex- pected to wear evening dress, minus gloves, and that it was imperative on the part of Madama to be costumed completely in 84 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. black and to wear only a black veil on her hair. Such was one of the whims of a Cer- tain Old Gentleman. Here a dilemma arose. Among Mar dama's wardrobe there was no costume of this lugubrious description. The nearest approach to it was a statuesque black robe, elaborately looped and covered with agree- able arabesques of turquoise -blue silk. There was nothing to do but to rip off these celestial trimmings, and they were ripped off, though it went against the wo- man-heart. Poor, vain little silk dress, that had never been worn, what swift ret- ribution overtook you for being nothing but artistic, and graceful, and lovely, and — Parisian, which includes all blessed ad- jectives ! From the bottom of a trunk in which they had lain since we left London, H and I exhumed our dress-coats. Though perfectly new (like their amiable sister, the black silk gown), they came out looking A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 85 remarkably aged. They had inexplicable bulges in the back, as if they had been worn by somebody with six or eight shoul- der-blades, and were covered all over in front with minute wrinkles, recalling the famous portrait of the late Mr. Parr in his hundred and fiftieth year. H and I got into our creased elegance with not more intemperate comment than might be pardoned, and repaired to the parlor, where we found Madama arranging a voluminous veil of inky crape over her hair, and re- garding herseK in a full-length mirror with gloomy satisfaction. The carriage was at the parte coohere, and we departed, stealing silently through the deserted hotel corridor, and looking for all the world, I imagine, like a couple of rascally undertakers mak- ing off with a nun. 86 FROM PONKAFOG TO PESTH. n. We had been so expeditious in our prep- arations that on seating ourselves in the carriage we found much superfluous time on our hands ; so we went around Robin Hood's barn to our destination — a delight- ful method in Rome — taking the Cenci Palace and the Hilda's Tower of Haw- thorne's romance in our impartial sweep, and stopping at a shop in the Piazza di Spagna, where Madama purchased an am- ber rosary for only aboiit three times as many lire as she need have paid for it any- where else on the globe. If an Italian shop- keeper should be submitted to a chemical analysis, and his rascality carefuUjr sepa- rated from the other ingredients and thrown away, there would be nothing left of him. I think it is Dumas fils who remarks that A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 87 the ancients laad but one god for shop- keepers and thieves. There were not many persons to be seen in the streets. It was nearing the hour when Rome keeps in-doors and takes its ease ; besides, it was out of season, as 1 have stated, and the Gaul and the Briton, and the American savage with his bowie- knife and revolver, had struck a trail north- ward. At the church portals, to be sure, was the usual percentage of distressing beg- gars — the old hag out of Macbeth, who insists on lifting the padded leather door- screen for you, the one-eyed man, the one- armed man, the one-legged man, and other fi-agments. The poor you have always with you, in Italy. They lash themselves, meta- phorically, to the spokes of your carriage- wheel, and go round with you. Ever since our second arrival in Rome the population seemed to have been under- going a process of evaporation. From the carriage-window we now and then caught 88 FROM PONKAPOG TO FESTH. siglit of a sandalled monk flitting by in the shadow of a tall building — the sole human thing that appears to be in a hurry in this stagnant city. His furtive air betrays his consciousness that he is only tolerated where he once ruled nearly supreme. It is an evil time for him ; his tenure is brief. Now that the government has unearthed him, he is fading out like a Pompeian fresco. As he glides by, there in the shade, with the aspect of a man belated on some errand of vital import, I have an idea he is not going anywhere in particular. _ Before these dole- ful days had befallen the Church of Rome, every third figure you met was a gray- cowled friar, or a white-robed Dominican, or a shovel-hatted reverend father looking like a sharp raven; but they all are rare birds now, and, for the most part, the few that are left stick to their perches in the stricken, mouldy old monasteries and con- vents, shedding their feathers and wasting away hour by hour, the last of the brood ! A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 89 In the vicinity of Trajan's Column Ave encountered a bewilclered-looking goat-herd, who had strayed in from the Cahipagna, perhaps with some misty anticipation that the Emperor Nero had a fresh lot of choice Christians to be served up that day in the arena of the Coliseum. I wondered if this rustic wore those pieces of hairy goatskin laced to his calves in July and August. It threw one into a perspiration to look at him. But I forgave him on inspection, for with his pointed hat, through an aperture of which his hair had run to seed, and his scarlet sash, and his many-colored tattered habiliments, he was the only bit of pic- turesque costume we saw in Rome. Pic- turesque costume is a thing of the past there, except those fraudulent remains of it that hang about the studios in the Via Margutta, or at the steps of the Trinita de' Monti, on the shoulders of professional models. Even the Corso was nearly deserted and 90 FBOM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. quite dull this day, and it is scarcely gay when it is thronged, as we saw it early in the spring. Possibly it is lively during the Carnival. It would need masking and music and illumination to lift its gloom, in spite of its thousand balconies. The sense of antiquity and the heavy, uncompromis- ing architecture of Rome oppress one pain- fully until one comes to love her. My im- pression of Rome is something so solid and tangible that I have felt at times as if I could pack it in a box, like a bas-relief, or a statue, or a segment of a column, and send it home by the Cunard line. Com- pared with the airiness and grace and color of other Continental cities, Rome is duU. The arcades of Bologna and the dingy streets of Verona and Padua are not duller. If I linger by the way, and seem in no haste to get to a Certain Old Gentleman, it is because the Roman atmosphere has in it some medicinal property that induces reverie and procrastination, and relaxes the A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 91 sinews of effort. I wonder where Caligula found the enterprise to torture his victims, and Brutus the vivacity to stab CcBsar. Our zigzag route brought us back to the Piazza del Popolo, from which we turned into the Via Ripetta on the left, and rat- tled over the stone pavement past the Cas- tle of St. Angelo, towards St. Peter's. It was not until the horses slackened their speed, and finally stood still in a spacious cortile at the foot of a wide flight of stone steps, that our purpose dropped a certain fantastic aspect it had worn, and became a serious if not a solemn business. Notwith- standing our deliberations over the matter at the hotel, I think I had not fully real- ized that in proposing to visit a Certain - Old Geijtleman we were proposing to visit the Pope of Rome.-' The proposition had seemed all along like a piece of mild pleas- 1 Since this paper was written, Pius IX., Cardinal Anto- nelli, and King Victor Emmanuel have laid down the burden of life. These distinguished personages seem to have con- spired to render my note-book obsolete. 92 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. antry, as if one should say, "I think I'll drop round on Titus Flavius in the course of the forenoon," or " I 've half a mind to look in on Cicero and Pompey, and see how they feel this morning after their little dissipation last night at the villa of Lucul- lus." The Pope of. Rome — not the Pope regnant, but the Pope of Rome in the ab- stract — had up to that hour presented himself to my mental eye as an august spectacular figure-head, belonging to no particular period, who might turn out after all to be an ingenious historical fiction per- petrated by the same humorist that in- vented Pocahontas. The Pope of Rome ! — he had been as vague to me as Adam and as improbable as Noah. But there stood Signor V at the car- riage-step, waiting to conduct us into the Vatican, and there, on either side of the portals at the head of the massive stair- case, lounged two of the papal guard in that jack - of - diamonds costume which Michael A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 93 Angelo designed for them — in the way of a practical joke, I fancy. They held hal- berds in their hands, these mediseval gentle- men, and it was a mercy they did n't chop us to pieces as we passed between them. "What an absurd uniform for a man-at-arms of the nineteenth century ! These fellows, clad in rainbow, suggested a pair of harle- quins out of a Christmas pantomime. Far- ther on we came to more stone staircase, and more stupid papal guard with melodra- matic battle-axes, and were finally ushered into a vast, high -studded chamber at the end of a much-stuccoed corridor. Coming as we did out of the blinding sunshine, this chamber seemed to us at first but a gloomy cayern. It was so poorly lighted by numerous large windows on the western side that several seconds elapsed before we could see anything distinctly. One or two additional windows would have made it quite dark. At the end of the apartment, near the door at which we had 9-1 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. entered, was a dais witli three tawdry ro- coco gilt arm-chairs, having for background an enormous painting of the Virgin, but by what master I was unable to make out. The draperies of the room were of some heavy dark stuff, a green rep, if I remem- ber, and the floor was covered with a thick carpet through which the solid stone flag- ging beneath repelled the pressure of your foot. There was a singular absence of color everywhere, of that mosaic work and Renaissance gilding with which the eyes soon become good friends in Italy. The frescoes of the ceiling, if there were any frescoes, were in some shy neutral tint, and did not introduce themselves to us. On the right, at the other extremity of the room, was a double door, which led, as we were correct in supposing, to the private apartments of the Pope. Presently our eyes grew reconciled to the semi-twilight, which seemed to have been transported hither with a faint spicy odor A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 95 of incense from some ancient basilica — a proper enough light for an audience-cham- ber in the Vatican. Fixed against the wall on either side, and extending nearly the entire length of the room, was a broad set- tee, the greater part of which was already occupied when we entered. Formerly wo- men were not allowed a public audience with the Pope. Madame Jimot, in giving in her M^moires an account of her inter- view with Pius VII., says : " Whenever a woman is presented to the Pope, it must be so managed as to have the appearance of accident. Women are not admitted into the Vatican, but his Holiness permits them to be presented to him in the Sistine Chapel, or in his promenades. But the meeting must always appear to be the ef- fect of chance." I do not know when this custom fell into desuetude ; possibly long before the reign of Pius IX. The major- ity of the persons now present were wo- men. 96 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. Signor V stationed himself at our side, and began a conversation witli H on the troubles that had overtaken and the perils that still menaced the True Church. The disintegration of nunneries and monas- teries and the closing up of religious houses had been fraught with much individual suffering. Hundreds of simple, learned men had been suddenly thrust out into a world of which they had no knowledge and where they were as helpless as so many in- fants. In some instances the government had laid hands on strictly private proper- ties, on funds contributed by private per- sons to establish asylums for women of noble birth in reduced circumstances — portionless daughters and cousins desirous of leading a life of pious meditation and seclusion. Many of these institutions pos- sessed enormous revenues, and were strong temptations to the Italian government, whose money-chest gave out a pathetically hollow sound when tapped against in 1870. A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 97 One does not need to be a Catholic to per- ceive the injustice of this kind of seizure ; one's sympathy may go forth mth the un- housed nuns : as to the monks — it does not hurt any man to earn his own living. The right and the necessity to work ought to be regarded as a direct blessing from God by men who, for these many centuries, have had their stomachs " with good capon lined," chiefly at the expense of the poor. Conversation had become general ; every one spoke in a subdued tone, and a bee-like hum rose and feU on the air. With the exception of a neat little body, with her husband, at our right, the thirty or forty persons present were either French, Ger- man, English, Russian, or Italian. I remarked to Signor V on the ab- sence of the American element, and attrib- uted it to the lateness of the season. " That does not wholly explain it," said Signor V . "There were numberless applications from Americans to attend this 7 98 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. reception, but his Holiness just at present is not inclined to receive many Ameri- cans." "Why not?" "A few weeks ago, his Holiness was treated with great disrespect by an Ameri- can, a lawyer from one of your Western States, I believe, who did not rise from his seat or kiieel when the Pope entered the room." " He ought to have risen, certainly ; but is it imperative that one should kneel ? " " It is ; but then, it is not imperative on any one to be presented to his Holiness. If the gentleman did not wish to conform to the custom, he ought to have stayed away." "He might have been ignorant of that phase of the ceremony," said I, with a sud- den poignant sense of sympathy with my unhappy countryman. " What befell him ? " " He was courteously escorted from the chamber by the gentleman in waiting," A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 99 said Signor V , glancing at an official near the door, who looked as if he were a cross between a divinity student and a po- liceman. It occurred to me that few things would be less entertaining than to be led out of this audience-chamber in the face and eyes of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy — in the face and eyes of the civilized world, in fact ; for would not the next number of GaKgnani's Messenger have a paragraph about it? I had supposed that Catholics knelt to the Pope, as a matter of course, but that Protestants were exempt from pay- ing this homage, on the same ground that Quakers are not expected to remove their hats like other folk. I wondered what Friend Eli would do, if destiny dropped him into the midst of one of the receptions of Pius IX. However, it was somewhat late to go to the bottom of the matter, so I dismissed it from my mind, aiid began an examination of my neighbors. 100 FROM PONKAPOG TO P^STB. A cynic has observed tliat all cats are gray in tlie twilight. He said cats, but meant women. I am convinced that all women are not alike in a black silk dress, very simply trimmed and with no color about it except a white rose at the corsage. There are women — perhaps not too many — whose beauty is heightened by an aus- tere toilette. Such a one was the lady op- posite me, with her veil twisted under her chin and falling negligently over the left shoulder. The beauty of her face flashed out like a diamond from its sombre setting. She had the brightest of dark eyes, with such a thick, long fringe of dark eyelashes that her whole countenance turned into night when she drooped her eyelids ; when she lifted them, it was morning again. As if to show us what might be done in the manner of contrasts, nature had given this lady some newly coined Roman gold for hair. I think Eve was that way — both blonde and brunette. My vis-d-via would A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 101 have been gracious in any costume, but I am positive that nothing would have gone so well with her as the black silk dress, fit- ting closely to the pliant bust and not los- ing a single line or curve. As she sat, turned three quarters face, the window be- hind her threw the outlines of her slender figure into sharp relief. The lady herself was perfectly well aware of it. Next to this charming person was a sub- stantial English matron, who wore her hair done up in a kind of turret, and looked like a lithograph of a distant view of Windsor Castle. She sat bolt upright, and formed, if I may say so, the initial letter of a long line of fascinatingly ugly women. Imagine a row of Sphinxes in deep mourning. It would have been an unbroken line of femi- nine severity, but for a handsome young priest with a strikingly spiritual face, who came in, like a happy word in parenthesis, half-way down the row. I soon exhausted the resources of this part of the room ; my 102 FBOM PONKAPOG TO PESTff. eyes went back to the Italian lady so pret- tily framed in the embrasure of the window, and would have lingered there had I not got interested in an old gentleman seated on my left. When he came into the room, blinking his kindly blue eyes and rubbing his hands noiselessly together and beaming beneYolently on everybody, just as if he were expected, I fell in love with him. His fragile, aristocratic hands appeared to have been done up by the same blancMs- seuse who did his linen, which was as white and crisp as an Alpine snow-drift, as were also two wintry strands of hair artfully trained over either ear. Otherwise he was as bald and shiny as a glacier. He seated himself with an old-fashioned, courteous bow to the company assembled, and a pro- testing wave of the hand, as if to say, " Good people, I pray you, do not disturb yourselves," and made all that side of the room bright with his smiling. He looked so clean and sweet, just such a wholesome A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN: 103 figure as one would like to have at one's fiieside as grandfather, that I began formu- lating the wish that I might, thirty or forty years hence, be taken for his twin brother ; when a neighbor of his created a distur-, bance. This neighbor was a young Italian lady or gentleman — I cannot aflBrm which — of perhaps ten months' existence, who up to the present time had been asleep in the anns of its bonne. Awaking suddenly, the bambino had given vent to the shrillest shrieks, impelled thereto by the strange- ness of the surrounding features, or perhaps by some conscientious scruples about being in the Vatican. I picked out the mother at once by the worried expression that flew to the countenance of a lady near me, and in a gentleman who instantly assumed an air of having no connection whatever with the baleful infant, I detected the father. I do not remember to have seen a stronger instance of youthful depravity and dupli- 104 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. city than that lemon-colored child afforded. The moment the nurse walked with it, it sunk into the sweetest of slumber, and peace settled upon its little nose like a drowsy bee upon the petal of a flower ; but the instant the honne made a motion to sit down, it broke forth again. I do not know what ultimately befell the vocal goblin ; possibly it was collared by the lieutenant of the guard outside, and thrown into the deepest dungeon of the palace ; at all events it disappeared after the announcement that his Holiness would be with us shortly. Whatever virtues Pius IX. possessed, punc- tuality was not one of them, for he had kept us waiting three quarters of an hour, and we had still another fifteen minutes to wait. The monotonous hum of conversation hushed itself abruptly, the two sections of the wide door I have mentioned were thrown open, and the Pope, surrounded by his cardinals and a number of foreign A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 105 princes, entered. The occupants of the two long settees rose, and then, as if they were automata worked by the same tyran- nical wire, sunk simultaneously into an at- titude of devotion. For an instant I was seized with a desperate desire not to kneel. There is something in an American knee, when it is rightly constructed, that makes it an awkward thing to kneel with before any man born of woman. Perhaps, if the choice were left one, either to prostrate one's self before a certain person or be shot, one might make a point of it — and be shot. But that was not the alternative in the present case. If I had failed to follow the immemorial custom I should not have had the honor of a fusilade, but would have been ignominiously led away by one of those highly-colored Swiss guards, and, in my dress suit, would have presented to the general stare the appearance of a preten- tious ace of spades being wiped out by a gay right-bower. Such humiliation was not to 106 FROM PONKAPOG TO PE8TH. be thought of ! So, wishing myself safely- back amid the cruder civihzation of the New World, and with a mental protest ac- companied by a lofty compassion for the weakness and cowardice of human-kind, I slid softly down with the rest of the miser- able sinners. I was in the very act, when I was chilled to the marrow by catching a sidelong glimpse of my benign old gentle- man placidly leaning back in his seat, with his hands folded over his well-filled waist- coat and that same benevolent smile pet- rified on his countenance. He was fast asleep. Immediately a tall, cadaverous person in a scant, funereal garment emerged from somewhere, and touched the sleeper on the shoulder. The old gentleman unclosed his eyes slowly and with difficulty, and was so far from taking in the situation that he made a gesture as if to shake hands with the tall, cadaverous person. Then it all flashed upon the dear old boy, and he A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 107 dropped to Ms knees with so comical and despairing an air of contrition that the presence of forty thousand popes would not have prevented me from laughing. Another discomposing incident occurred at this juncture. Two removes below me was a smooth-faced German of gigantic stature; he must have been six or seven inches over six feet in height, but so ab- surdly short between the knee-cap and ankle that as he knelt he towered head and shoulders above us all, resembling a great, overgrown school-boy, standing up as straight as he could. It was so he im- pressed one of the ghostly attendants, who advanced quickly towards hhn with the evident purpose of requesting him to kneel. Discovering his error just in time, the rev- erend father retreated, much abashed. All eyes were now turned toward the Pope and his suite, and this trifling episode passed unnoticed save by two or three in- dividuals in the immediate neighborhood, 108 FROM PONKAFOG TO PESTH. wlio succeeded in swallowing their smiles, but did not dare glance at each, other after- wards. The Pope advanced to the centre of the upper end of the room, leaning heav- ily on his ivory-handled cane, the princes in black and the cardinals in scarlet stand- ing behind him in picturesque groups, like the chorus in an opera. Indeed, it was all like a scene on the stage. There was something premeditated and spectacular about it, as if these persons had been en- gaged for the occasion. Several of the princes were Russian, with names quite well adapted to not being remembered. Among the Italian gentlemen was Cardi- nal Nobli Vatteleschi — he was not a car- dinal then, by the way — who died not long ago. Within whispering distance of the Pope stood Cardinal AntoneUi — a man who would not escape observation in any assem- bly of notable personages. If the Inquisi- tion should be revived in its early genial A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 109 form, and the reader should fall into its hands — as would very likely be the case, if a branch office were established in this country — he would feel scarcely comfort- able if his chief inquisitor had so cold and subtle a countenance as Giacome Anto- nelli's. We occasionally meet in political or in social life a man whose presence seems to be an anachronism — a man belonging to a type we fancied extinct ; he affects us as a hying dodo would the naturalist, though perhaps not with so great an enthusiasm. Cardinal Antonelli, in his bearing and the cast of his countenance, had that air of re- moteness which impresses us in the works of the old masters. I had seen somewhere a head of Velasquez for which the cardinal might have posed. With the subdued af- ternoon light falling upon him through the deep-set lunette, he seemed Kke some cruel prelate escaped from one of the earher vol- umes of Fronde's History of England — 110 FROM PONKAPOG TO FESTH. subtle, haughty, intolerant. I did not mean to allow so sinister an impression to remain on my mind ; but all I have since read and heard of Cardinal AntoneUi has not obliterated it. It was a pleasure to turn from the im- passible prime minister to the gentle and altogether interesting figure of his august master, with his small, sparkling eyes, re- markably piercing when he looked at you point-blank, and a smile none the less win- some that it lighted up a mouth denoting unusual force of will. His face was not at all the face of a man who-had passed nearly half a century in arduous diplomatic and ecclesiastical labors ; it was certainly the face of a man who had led a temperate, blameless private life, in noble contrast to many of his profligate predecessors, whom the world was only too glad to have snugly stowed away in their gorgeous porphyry coffins with a marble mistress carved atop. Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti was born A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. Ill in Sinigaglia on the 13th of May, 1792 ; the week previous to this reception he had celebrated his eighty-third birthday; but he did not look over sixty-five or seventy, as he stood there in his skull-cap of cream- white broadcloth and his long pontifical robes of the same material — a costume that lent an appearance of height to an un- dersized, stoutly built figure. With his sil- very hair straggling from beneath the skull- cap, and his smoothly-shaven pale face, a trifle heavy, perhaps because of the double chin, he was a very beautiful old man. After pausing a moment or two in the mid- dle of the chamber, and taking a bird's-eye glance at his guests, the Pope began his rounds. Assigned to each group of five or ten persons was an official who presented the visitors by name, indicating their na- tionality, station, etc. So far as the nation- ality was involved, that portion of the in- troduction was obviously superfluous, for the Pope singled out his countrymen at a 112 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTB. glance, and at once addressed them in Ital- ian, scarcely waiting for tlie master of cere- monies to perform Ms duties. To foreign- ers his Holiness spoke in French. After a few words of salutation he gave his hand to each person, who touched it with his lips or his forehead, or simply retained it an instant. It was a deathly cold hand, on the forefinger of which was a great seal ring bearing a mottled gray stone that seemed frozen. As the Pope moved slowly along, devotees caught at the hem of his robe and pressed it to their lips, and in most instances bowed down and kissed his feet. I suppose it was only by years of practice that his Holiness was able to avoid stepping on a nose here and there. It came our turn at last. As he ap- proached us he said, with a smUe, " Ah, I see you are Americans." Signer V then presented us formally, and the Pope was kind enough to say to ils what he had probably said to twenty thousand other A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 113 Americans in the course of several hundred similar occasions. After he had passed on, the party that had paid their respects to him resiuned their normal position — I am not sure this was not the most enjoyable feature of the afEair — and gave themselves up to watching the other presentations. When these were concluded, the Pope re- turned to the point of his departure, and proceeded to bless the rosaries and crosses and souvenirs that had been brought, in greater or lesser numbers, by every one. There were salvers piled with rosaries, arms strung from wrist to shoulder with rosaries — so many carven amulets, and circlets of beads and crucifixes, indeed, that it would have been the labor of weeks to bless them separately; so his Holiness blessed them in bulk. It was then that the neat little Ameri- can lady who sat next us confirmed my suspicions as to her brideship by slyly slip- ping from her wedding finger a plain gold 114 FROM PONKAFOG TO PESTH. ring, whicli ste attaclied to her rosary with a thread from her veil. Seeing herself de- tected in the act, she turned to Madama, and, making up the most piquant little face in the world, whispered confidentially, " Of course I 'm not a Roman Catholic, you know ; but if there 's anything efficacious in the blessing, I don't want to lose it. I want to take all the chances." For my part, I hope and believe the Pope's bless- ing will cling to that diminutive wedding ring for many and many a year. This ceremony finished, his Holiness ad- dressed to his guests the neatest of fare- wells, delivered in enviable French, in which he wished a prosperous voyage to those pilgrims whose homes lay beyond the sea, and a happy return to all. "When he touched, as he did briefly, on the misfor- tunes of the church, an adorable fire came into his eyes ; fifty of his eighty-three win- ters slipped from him as if by enchantment, and for a few seconds he stood forth in the A VISIT TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. 115 prime of life. He spoke some five or seven minutes, and nothing could have been more dignified and graceful than the matter and the manner of his words. The benediction was followed by a general rustle and move- ment among the princes and eminenze at the farther end of the room ; the double door opened softly, and closed — and that was the last the Pope saw of us. VI. ON A BALCONY. VI. ON A BALCONY. A BALCONY, as we northerns know it, is a humiliating architectural link between ia-doors and out-of-doors. To be on a bal- cony is to be nowhere in particular : you are not exactly at home, and yet cannot be described as out; your priyacy and your freedom are alike sacrificed. The approach- ing bore has you at his mercy ; he can draw a bead on you with his rifled eye at a hun- dred paces. You may gaze abstractedly at a cloud, or turn your back, but you cannot escape him, though the chance is always open to you to drop a bureau on him as he lifts his hand to the bell-knob. One could fill a volume with a condensed catalogue of 120 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. the inconveniences of an average balcony. But when the balcony hangs from the third-story window of an Old World palace, and when the fagade of that Old World palace looks upon the Bay of Naples, you had better think twice before you speak depreciatingly of balconies. With that sheet of mysteriously blue water in front of you; with Mount Vesuvius moodily smoking his perpetual calumet on your left ; with the indented shore sweeping to- wards Pozzuoli and Baise on your right ; with Capri and Ischia notching the ashen gray line of the horizon ; with the tender heaven of May bending over all — with these accessories, I say, it must be con- ceded that one might be very much worse off in this world than on a balcony. I know that I came to esteem the narrow iron-grilled shelf suspended from my bed- room window in the hotel on the Strada Chiatamone as the choicest spot in all Nar pies. After a ramble through the unsavory ON A BALCONY. 121 streets it was always a pleasure to get back to it, and I think I never in my life did a more sensible thing in the department of pure idleness than when I resolved to spend an entire day on that balcony. One morn- ing, after an early breakfast, I established myself there in an arm-chair placed beside a small table holding a couple of books, a paper of cigarettes, and a field-glass. My companions had gone to explore the pic- ture-galleries ; but I had my picture-gallery chez moi — in the busy strada below, in the villa-fringed bay, in the cluster of yellow- roofed little towns clinging to the purple slopes of Mount Vesuvius and patiently awaiting annihilation. The beauty of Na- ples lies along its water-front, and from my coigne of vantage I had nothing to desire. If the Bay of Naples had not been de- scribed a million times during the present century, I should still not attempt to de- scribe it : I have made a discovery which no other traveller seems to have made — 122 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. that its loveliness is untranslatable. More- over, enthusiasm is not permitted to the modern tourist. He may be aesthetic, or historic, or scientific, or analytic, or didac- tic, or any kind of ic, except enthusiastic. He may be Meissonier-like ' in his detail; he may give you the very tint and texture of a honeycombed frieze over a Byzantine gateway, or lay bare the yet faintly palpi- tating heart of some old-time tragedy, but he must do it in a nonchalant, pulseless manner, with a semi-supercilious elevation of nostril. He would lose his self-respect if he were to be deeply moved by anything, or really interested in anything. " All that lie sees in Bagdad Is the Tigris to float him away." He is the very antipode of his elder brother of fifty years syne, who used to go about filling his note-book vdth Thoughts on Standing at the Tomb of Marcus Antoni- nus, Emotions on Finding a Flea on my Shirt Collar in the Val d'Arno, and the OM A BALCONY. 123 like. The latter-day tourist is a great deal less innocent, but is he more amusing than those old-fashioned sentimental travellers who had at least freshness of sympathies and never dreamed of trying to pass them- selves off as cynics ? Dear, ingenuous, im- pressible souls — peace to your books of travel ! May they line none but trunks destined to prolonged foreign tours, or those thrice happy trunks which go on bridal journeys ! At the risk of being relegated to the footing of those emotional ancients, I am going to confess to an unrequited passion for Mount Vesuvius. Never was passion less regarded by its object. I did not as- pire to be received with the warmth of manner that characterized its reception of the elder Pliny in the year 79, but I did want Mount Vesuvius to pay me a little at- tention, which it might easily have done — without putting itself out. On arriving in town I had called on Mount Vesuvius. 124 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTS. The acquaintance rested there. Every night, after my candle was extinguished, I stood a while at the open window and glanced half-expectantly across the bay; but the sullen monster made no sign. That slender spiral column of smoke, spreading out like a toad-stool on attaining a certain height, but neither increasing nor diminish- ing in volume, lifted itself into the star- light. Sometimes I fancied that the smoke Ijiad taken a deeper lurid tinge ; but it was only fancy. How I longed for a sudden burst of flame and scoriae from those yawn- ing jaws ! — for one awful instant's illumi- nation of the bay and the shipping and the picturesque villages asleep at the foot of the mountain ! I did not care to have the spectacle last more than four or five heart- beats at the longest; but it was a thing worth wishing for. I do not believe that even the most hard- ened traveller is able wholly to throw off the grim fascination of Mount Vesuvius so ON A BALCONY. 125 long as lie is near it; and I quite under- stand the potency of the spell which has led the poor people of Resina to set up their Lares and Penates on cinder-buried Herculaneum. Bide your time, O Resina, and Portici, and Torre del Greco ! The doom of Pompeii and Herculaneum shall yet be yours. "If it be now, 'tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be not now, yet it will come." Indeed, these villages have suffered re- peatedly in ancient and modern times. In the eruption of 1631 seven torrents of lava swept down the mountain, taking in their course Bosco, Torre dell' Annunziata, Torre del Greco, Resina, and Portici, and destroy- ing three thousand lives. That calamity and later though not so terrible catastro- phes have not prevented the people from rebuilding on the old sites. The singular fertility of the soil around the base of the volcanic pile lures them back — or is it that they are under the influence of that 126 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. nameless glamour I have hinted at ? Per- haps those half-indistinguishable shapes of petrified gnome and satyr and glyptodon which lie tumbled in heaps all about this region have something to do with it. It would be easy to believe that some of the nightmare figures and landscapes in Dora's illustrations of The Wandering Jew were suggested to the artist by the fantastic forms in which the lava streams have cooled along the flanks of Vesuvius. A man might spend a busy life in study- ing the phenomena of this terrible moun- tain. It is undergoing constant changes. The paths to the crater have to be varied from month