There was next morning nothing to recall the dismal weather of the day before except the deep mud of the highway and my garments, still dripping wet when I drew them on. The vine-covered hillsides and rolling plains below, the lizards basking on every rock and ledge, peasant women plodding barefooted along the route gave to the land an aspect far different from that of the valley of the Rhône. It was hard to realize that the open fields and chilling night winds of Switzerland were not hundreds of miles away, but just behind the flanking range.
The French and German that had so long served me must now give place to my none too fluent Italian. In the grey old town of Domo d’Ossola I halted at a booth to buy a box of matches.
“Avete allumette?” I demanded of the brown-visaged matron in charge.
I have always had an unconquerable feeling that the French “allumette” ought really to be an Italian word; but my attempt to introduce it into that language failed dismally.
“Cose sono allumette?” croaked the daughter of Italy, with such overdrawn sarcasm that it was all too evident that she understood the term, but did not propose to admit any knowledge of the despised francese tongue.
“Fiammiferi, voglio dire,” I replied, recalling the correct word.
“Ah! Ecco!” cried the matron, handing me a box with her blandest smile.
I quickly discovered, too, that the language of the Divine Comedy was not the one in which to make known my simple wants. But being more familiar with the phraseology of the famous Florentine than with the speech of the masses, I found myself, in those first days in the peninsula, prone to converse in poetics despite a very prosaic temperament. As when, in the outskirts of Domo d’Ossola, I turned to a chestnut vendor at a fork in the road, and pointing up one of the branches, demanded:
“Ah!—er—Perme si va nella città dol—Confound it, no, I mean is this the road to Varese?”
To which the native, to whose lips was mounting a “non capisc’” at sound of the Dantesque phrase, answered in a twinkling: