“I am happy to say, sir,” replied the lady with intense acidity, “that I do not.” But she added triumphantly, “What do you say when I tell you that I had my cheque-book? How could I have possessed it if I had not a right to draw?”
“Any scamp,” I replied, “can deposit a few pounds in a bank, buy a cheque-book, and then draw his money.”
But the next day she came to me in radiant sneering triumph. She had found another banker, who was a gentleman, with a marked emphasis, who had cashed her cheque. How many people there are in this world whose definition of a gentleman is “one who does whatever pleases us!”
In Florence we went directly to the Hotel d’Europe in the Via Tuornabuoni, where my Indian blanket vanished even while entering the hotel, and surrounded only by the servants to whom the luggage had been confided. As the landlord manifested great disgust for me whenever I mentioned such a trifle, and as the porter and the rest declared that they would answer soul and body for one another’s honesty, I had to grin and bear it. I really wonder sometimes that there are not more boarders, who, like Benvenuto Cellini, set fire to hotels or cut up the bedclothes before leaving them. That worthy, having been treated not so badly as I was at the Hotel d’Europe and at another in Florence, cut to pieces the sheets of his bed, galloped away hastily, and from the summit of a distant hill had the pleasure of seeing the landlord in a rage. Now people write to the Times, and “cut up” the whole concern. It all comes to the same thing.
In Florence I saw much of an old New York friend, the now late Lorimer Graham. When he died, Swinburne wrote a poem on him. He was a man of great culture and refined manner. There was something sympathetic in him which
drew every one irresistibly into liking. It was his instinct to be kind and thoughtful to every one. He gave me letters to Swinburne, Lord Houghton, and others.
I made an acquaintance by chance in Florence whom I can never forget: for he was a character. One day while in the Uffizi Gallery engaged in studying the great Etruscan vase, now in the Etruscan Museum, a stranger standing by me said, “Does not this seem to you like a mysterious book written in forgotten characters? Is not a collection of such vases like a library?”
“On that hint I spake.” “I see,” I replied, “you refer to the so-called Etruscan Library which an Englishman has made, and which contains only vases and inscriptions in that now unknown tongue of Etruria. And indeed, when we turn over the pages of Inghirami, Gherard, and Gori, Gray, or Dennis, it does indeed really seem—But what do you really think the old Etruscan language truly was?”
“Look here, my friend,” cried the stranger in broad Yankee, “I guess I’m barkin’ up the wrong tree. I calculated to tell you something, but you’re ahead of me.”
We both laughed and became very good friends. He lived at our hotel, and had been twenty-five years in Italy, and knew every custode in every gallery, and could have every secret treasure unlocked. He was perfectly at home about town—would stop and ask a direction of a cab-driver, and was capable of going into an umbrella-shop when it rained.