“With your help, my friends,” he said to the cabbies, “I will climb to the top of the tomb;” two of them boosted him up. “If you will listen, I will tell you some things about the great Nero you never heard before. He was, after all, an artist; the historians have been too hard upon him, as we artists ought not to forget.”
Perhaps Galli’s long speech glorifying Nero set the present fashion for the whitewashing of Cæsars generally! The cabmen squatted round on their hunkers, smoked their pipes and listened, for the enlightenment of future forestieri—till Galli scrambled down from the rostrum, and jumped into the first cab, crying,—
“Andiamo! to the Piazza di Spagna, as we came!”
At the Café Greco that evening Galli, penniless but proud of his adventure, borrowed of Signorino Jacca twenty centesimi (four cents) to buy a piece of bread and a few pickled gherkins, which he brought back in a piece of paper and munched contentedly for his supper.
Remembering Galli’s talent for likenesses, J. once persuaded a pretty young American girl to sit to him for her portrait. When they arrived at the studio for the first sitting, the room was so littered with rubbish that there was hardly space to turn round; tiers of vile-smelling old petroleum cases were piled against the wall. “What on earth have you got in those boxes, Galli?” J. demanded.
“They contain my invention,” said Galli.
“Altro! it is the model of a bridge to cross the Atlantic from Italy to the United States.”
It was a cold day; to warm the room for his sitter, Galli had picked up a few bits of charcoal, which smouldered in a frying-pan without a handle (his only stove) in the middle of the studio. While Galli was finding a chair for the lady, J. discovered seven rat traps, each inhabited by a large family of mice.
“They disturbed me so much, scrabbling about and gnawing things,” Galli explained, “that I was obliged to catch them.”