“The nearest inn?”
“Six miles on.”
“Suppose I must go to bed supperless, then,” I sighed, drawing my water-soaked bundle from beneath my coat.
“Bed!” cried the landlord, “you cannot sleep here. I keep no lodging house.”
“What!” I protested, “do you think I am going on in this deluge?”
“I keep no lodging house,” repeated the host, doggedly.
I sat down on a bench, convinced that no three Italians should evict me without a struggle. One by one they came forward to try the efficacy of wheedling, growling, and loud-voiced bluster. I clung stolidly to my place. The landlord was on the verge of tears when one of the countrymen drew me to the window and offered me lodging in his barn across the way. I made out through the storm the dim outline of a building, and catching up my bundle, dashed with the native across the road and into a stone building, with no other floor, as I could feel under my feet, than Mother Earth. An American cow would balk at the door of the house of a mountain peasant of Italy; she would have fled bellowing at a glimpse of the interior of the barn that loomed up as my host lighted a lantern, and pointed out to me a heap of corn-husks in a corner behind the oxen and asses. Fearful of losing a moment with his cronies over the wine, he gave the lantern a shake that extinguished it and, leaving me in utter darkness, hurried away.
I groped my way towards the heap, narrowly escaped knocking down the last ass in the row, and was about to throw myself down on the husks when a man’s voice at my very feet shouted a word that I did not catch. Being in Italy I answered in Italian:
“Che avete? Voglio dormire qui.”
“Ach!” groaned the voice. “Nur ein verdammter Italiener!”