Spring flowers are thick everywhere. Yesterday brought such a clever letter from Miss D——. I think I must quote a bit or two to give you “a taste of her quality.”
I had sent some Xmas souvenirs to her and her sisters. Of the younger two—very young—she said: “You should have seen D—— and M—— when they told their friends, ‘My cousin in Paris sent me this,’ with the air of being thankful that they were not as other little girls that had no cousin in Paris.”
L. G. C.
Rome, March 19, 1883.
ROME.
E spent a day at Amalfi. From La Cava, a pretty town in an extensive vale shut in with the most picturesque chains of mountains, we took an open carriage for the three hours’ drive. It soon struck the seacoast and wound all the rest of the way around its headlands, doubling its promontories, retreating into its bays and inlets and dropping almost to the water’s edge, and presently mounting upward into almost Alpine heights. The headlands and cliffs were frequently broken into every imaginable form of rock sculpture—columns, cones, pyramids, grottoes and castellated walls of defense and fantastic ruins. The sea beat the shore, here, a sheer precipice, and there a white sanded beach, then rolled away a tangled mass of the most exquisite and innumerable shades of blue, green, purple, black, gold and silver. The coast stretched around in a vast semi-circle of silver till it lost itself in the misty horizon. Little villages lay at our feet, ran up the hill-sides with their terraces of orange-groves, or clung to the cliffs far overhead like martins’ nests in winter. A long range of snow-capped mountains reared themselves above Salerno, and sent us an icy blast now and then. There had been quite a snow the day before. We rattled up to our “albergo” at eleven. This was at the foot of the hill; our destination was an old monastery of the Capucins, now a hotel, of which this was the porter’s lodge. The same proprietor conducts both. He met us with the welcome accorded to favored guests, and gave us a guide, and we were off at once.
The practical should not be neglected entirely for the picturesque, so, we “took in” on our way, a macaroni factory. We saw the flour, then the kneading, last the moulding. The kneading is quite peculiar, and a long and fatiguing part. There is a flat, round table with a beam that works on and around it, the dough being placed between. Six youths of eighteen or twenty were on the end and worked it up and down and back and forth. The whole had a joint resemblance to a grist-mill and the game of see-sawing. The boys were bare-legged and looked very clean and cool. When the dough is sufficiently kneaded, it is transferred to the mould. This is a cylindrical-shaped machine, filled with the small cylinders through which the dough is forced to convert it into the little tubes with which we are so familiar. The dough is placed on one end and the pressure applied, which forces it through. The several squads of workmen are very eager to show off at their best, their palms tingling, no doubt, in expectation of the accustomed fee.