SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER I.
“CITTÀ VECCHIA!”
A comfortable family party came Romeward one May morning from Turin. They had the railway carriage quite to themselves, and occupied it fully. Mr. Vane lay stretched at length on the front seat, with a travelling-bag and two shawls under his head. It was his first visit to Italy, consequently his first approach to Rome, but he declined his daughters’ invitation to look out. He would prefer, he said, to admire the country when he should feel more in the mood. “Besides,” he said, “to look at scenery when one is going through it behind a locomotive irritates both the eyes and the temper. If you wish to see a near object, no sooner have you fixed your eyes upon it than it is whisked out of sight, and your pupils contract with a snap; if a distant one, the moment you perceive that it is worth seeing, some sharp bit of foreground starts up and enters like a bramble between your eyelids. It’s a Sancho Panza feast, and I’ll none of it. You children can look out and tantalize your tempers, if it please you.”
“Oh! thank you,” his daughter Isabel said dryly, availing herself of the permission.
Presently she addressed him again: “Papa, if I could find a fault in you, it would be that you are such a very unreasonably reasonable man. You have always so many arguments in favor of every proposition you lay down, there
isn’t a handle left to take it up by.”