Canned cranberries and tomatoes we had purchased from Brown, the polite English grocer in Via della Croce, who makes a specialty of “American goods.” Nazzari, the Incomparable (in Rome), furnished the dessert. Soup, fish, and some of the vegetables were essentially Italian, and none the worse on that account.
There was a strange commingling and struggle of pain and pleasure in that “make-believe” Christmas-at-home in a foreign land. It was a new and fantastically-wrought link in a golden chain that ran back until lost in the misty brightness of infancy. We gathered about our parlor-fire, for which we had, with some difficulty, procured a Yule-log of respectable dimensions; talked of loved and distant ones and other days; said, with heart and tongue, “Heaven bless the country we love the best, and the friends who, to-night, remember us as we think of them!” We told funny stories, all we could remember, in which the Average Briton and Traveling American figured conspicuously. We laughed amiably at each other’s jokes. We planned days and weeks of sight-seeing and excursions, waxed enthusiastic over the wealth of Roman ruins, and declared ourselves more than satisfied with the experiment of trans-ocean travel.
We were, or should be, on the morrow.
Now, between the eyes of our spirit and the storied riches of this sunbright elysium, the Italia of kings, consuls, emperors, and popes, glided visions of ice-bound rivers and snow-clad hills—of red firesides and jocund frolic, and clan-gatherings, from near and from far—of Christmas stockings, and Christmas trees, and Christmas greetings—of ringing skates, making resonant moonlit nights, and the tintinnabulations of sleigh-bells—of silent grave-yards, where the snow was lying spotless and smooth.
Beneath laugh and jest, and graver talk of visions fulfilled, and projects for future enjoyment—underlying all these was a slow-heaving main, hardly repressed—an indefinable, yet exquisite, heart-ache very far down.
CHAPTER XVI.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.
THERE is music by the best bands in Rome upon the Pincian Hill on Sabbath afternoons. Sitting at the window of our tiny library, affecting to read or write, my eyes wandered continually to the lively scene beyond. My fingers were beating time to the waltzes, overtures, and marches that floated over the wall and down the terraces—over the orange and camellia-trees, the pansy and violet-beds, and lilac-bushes in the court-yard, the pride of our handsome portiere’s heart—up to my Calvinistic ears. Drive and promenade were in full and near view, and up both streamed, for two hours, a tossing tide of carriages and pedestrians. It would flow down in variegated billows when the sun should paint the sky behind St. Peter’s golden-red. Resigning even the pretence of occupation by-and-by, I used to lie back in my easy-chair, my feet upon the fender, hemming in the wood-fire we never suffered to go out, and, watching the pleasure-making on the hill, dream until I forgot myself and the age in which I lived.