“This reminds me,” Isabel said, “of our first visit to the White Mountains. We went there under the ‘rainy Hyades,’ apparently; for we hadn’t seen sunshine for a week. When we reached Lancaster, at evening, the fog touched our faces like a wet flannel, and there was a fine, thick rain in the morning when I awoke. About nine o’clock there was a brightening, and I looked up and saw a blue spot. The clouds melted away from it, still raining, and sunbeams shot across, but none came through. First I saw a green plain with a river winding through it, and countless little pools of water, everything a brilliant green
and silver. A few trees stood about knee-deep in grass and yellow grain. And then, all at once, down through the rain of water came a rain of sunshine; and, lastly, the curtains parted, and there were the mountains! They are a great deal more solemn looking and impressive than these,” she said, with a depreciatory glance toward the Alban Mountains. “On the whole, I think the scene was finer and more brilliant.”
As if in answer to her criticism, a slim, swift sunbeam pierced suddenly the soft flecks of mist overhead, shot across the shadowed world, and dropped into Rome. Out blazed the marvellous dome, all golden in that light, the faint line of its distant colonnades started into vivid clearness with all their fine-wrought arches, and for a moment the city shone like a picture of a city seen by a magic-lantern in a dark room.
“Very true!” the young woman replied quite coolly, as if she had been spoken to. “We have no such city, no such towns and villages and villas set on the mountainside; but we are young and fresh and strong, and we are brave, which you are not. Your past, and the ruins left of it, are all you can boast of. We have a present and a future. And after all,” she said, turning to her audience, who were smilingly listening to this perfectly serious address, “it is ungrateful of the sun to take the part of Italy so, when we welcome him into our houses, and they shut him out. Why, the windows of the Holy Father’s rooms at the Vatican are half walled up.”
“Maybe the sun doesn’t consider it such a privilege to come into our houses,” her father suggested.
“And as for Rome,” the young woman went on, “to me it seems
only the skull of a dead Italy, and the Romans the worms crawling in and out. But there! I won’t scold to-day. How lovely everything is!”
The yellow-green vineyards and the blue-green canebrakes came in sight, the olive-orchards rolled their smoke-like verdure up the hills, and at length the cars slid between the rose-trees of the Frascati station, and the crowd of passengers poured out and hurried up the stairs to secure carriages to take them to the town. The family Ottant’-Otto, finding themselves in a garden, did not make haste to leave it, but stayed to gather each a nosegay, nobody interfering. More than one, indeed, of the passengers paused long enough to snatch a rosebud in passing.
Going up then to the station-yard, they found it quite deserted, except for the carriage that had been sent for them, and another drawn by a tandem of beautiful white horses, in whose ears their owner, one of the young princes living near the town, was fastening the roses he had just gathered below. The creatures seemed as vain of themselves as he evidently was proud of them, and held their heads quite still to be adorned, tossing their tails instead, which had been cut short, and tied round with a gay scarlet band.
Every traveller knows that Frascati is built up the sides of the Tusculan hills, looking toward Rome, the railway station on a level with the Campagna, the town rising above with its countless street-stairs, and, still above, the magnificent villas over which look the ruins of ancient Tusculum. On one of the lower streets of the town, in Palazzo Simonetti, lived a friend of the Signora, and there rooms had been