"You're the painter feller that helped me out of a hole yesterday? Yes, I knowed it; I see you come in to dinner last night. Eliza-beth said it was you, but you was so almighty rigged up in that swallow-tailed coat of yourn I didn't catch on for a minute, but Eliza-beth said she was dead sure."
"The lady with you—your wife?"
"HER HEAD CRAMMED FULL OF HIFALUTIN' NOTIONS"
"Not to any alarming extent, young man. Never had one—she's my sister—only one I got; and this summer she took it into her head—you don't mind my setting here, do you? I'm so durned lonesome among these jabbering Greeks I'm nearly froze stiff. Thank ye!—took it into her head she'd come over here, and of course I had to bring her. You ain't never traveled around, perhaps, with a young girl of fifty-five, with her head crammed full of hifalutin' notions,—convents and early masters and Mont Blancs and Bon Marchés,—with just enough French to make a muddle of everything she wants to get. Well, that's Eliza-beth. First it was a circulating library, at Unionville, back of Troy, where I live; then come a course of lectures twice a week on old Edinburgh and the Alps and German cities; and then, to cap all, there come a cuss with magic-lantern slides of 'most every old ruin in Europe, and half our women were crazy to get away from home, and Eliza-beth worse than any of 'em; and so I got a couple of Cook's tickets out and back, and here we are; and I don't mind saying," and a wicked, vindictive look filled his eyes, "that of all the cussed holes I ever got into in my life, this here Venice takes—the—cake. Here, John Henry, bring me another cup of coffee; this's stone-cold. P.D.Q., now! Don't let me have to build a fire under you." This to a waiter speaking every language but English.
"Do not the palaces interest you?" I asked inquiringly, in my effort to broaden his views.
"Palaces be durned! Excuse my French. Palaces! A lot of caved-in old rookeries; with everybody living on the second floor because the first one's so damp ye'd get your die-and-never-get-over-it if you lived in the basement, and the top floors so leaky that you go to bed under an umbrella; and they all braced up with iron clamps to keep 'em from falling into the canal, and not a square inch on any one of 'em clean enough to dry a shirt on! What kind of holes are they for decent—— Now see here," laying his hand confidingly on my shoulder, "just answer me one question—you seem like a level-headed young man, and ought to give it to me straight. Been here all summer, ain't you?"
"Yes."
"Been coming years, ain't you?"
I nodded my head.