I didn’t hanker for goin’ up to the top on’t—no, indeed! It tuckers me enough to go up into our wood-house chamber, about twenty odd steps. I wuzn’t goin’ to trail up three hundred steps—no, indeed!
But Martin sed that he would like to say that he had been there. So he toiled up the ascent, and so did Alice. And she sed that the view from the top wuz perfectly wonderful, takin’ in the beautiful country all round—cities, picteresque villages, and the blue waters of the Mediterranean twelve milds away.
And Martin sed that if that tower wuz in Chicago, with a outside elevator let down from the top to take folks up, and a cigar-stand and saloon on top, a man ort to clear five thousand dollars a year from it. And he sed the white marble it’s built on would make splendid mantlepieces, and he told how many it would make—I can’t remember, but a immense lot on ’em.
He’d figgered ’em up on the tower; he took his pencil out and figgered it up on the pinnakle, so, for all he realized, the entrancin’ view below might have been our four-acre paster or a huckleberry patch. We didn’t stay here long. Of course, we had to see the cathedral and Baptistery, great buildin’s built of white marble, and all ornamented off on the outside to as great an extent as I ever see, or ever expect to, and the Campo Santa has got frescoes in it that are beautiful beyend any tellin’ on.
There is lots of other things there that is worth seein’—the Museum, the University, the Aqueduct, etc.—but we didn’t stay to see em all, Martin, as usual, a-bein’ in a great hurry; but he sed that he wanted to say, of course, that he had paid proper attention to this city, which wuz one of the oldest in Europe. Before John the Baptist came preachin’ in the Wilderness this wuz a Roman town. It beats all! No wonder it’s a noisy old place—it has seen lots of trouble.
In goin’ out of it we went through so many tunnels, it skairt me most to death, and Josiah wuz skairt, too, though he wouldn’t own up to it, but I heard him sithe repeatedly; otherwise I wuz glad to go.
Wall, as I say, what I see in beautiful Florence can’t be told, and the enchantin’ seenery in the Valley of the Arno. The beautiful Casino, which even Martin admitted come almost up to Central Park (it is fur bigger and handsomer, though I wouldn’t want the Central Park folks to know I sed it, for it would be apt to mad ’em. It made Martin mad as a hen when I suggested it).
CHAPTER XXXI.
COLOSSEUM AND CATACOMBS.
It wuz jest as beautiful in Rome—magnificent palaces, cathedrals, picters, statutes, tapestry, mosaics, articles of virtue of all kinds, and immense gateways leadin’ into new seens of beauty, fountains, monuments, tombs, parks, wells, etc., etc., etc.