Here are the booths with rosaries, crucifixes, Virgin Mary's holy-water holders, medals of Pio Nono, or jewelry; gold crescent earrings, spadine (long silver hair pins); silver hearts, legs, arms, for votive offerings, and crosses without number.
Caper entered the church; it was filled, and stifling with heat and frankincense, and contadini, and wax lights burning before the shrine, on which the sun shone. There were beautiful faces among the pajine (people in fine raiment), showing what can be made from the contadine (people in coarse clothes) by not overworking them.
Once more our artist was in the pure air, and, walking up the main street, came to a house with a beautifully carved stone window, half Byzantine, half Gothic, while a house on the opposite side of the street boasted of two other windows finely carved. While looking at them, Caper was hailed by name, and a stout, fresh-colored English artist, named Wardor, whom he had known in Rome, came over and welcomed him to Genazzano. Wardor, it turned out, was spending the summer there, as he had done the year before; consequently, there was not a nook or corner in the old town he did not know; and if he had not been so lazy, he could have filled his sketch book with a hundred picturesque studies. But no; with the keenest appreciation of every bit of color, every graceful pose of a human figure, every beautiful face, every fine effect of light or shadow—he made no sign. His legitimate function was friendly guide to the stranger, and in this office he carried Caper all over the old castle, out to the long shady walk on the esplanade behind it, pointed out beautiful views over the valley; finally, showing Caper his studio, which, as it was a large room, and his padrona could impose on his good nature, was fairly glittering with copper pans, hung on the walls when not in use in the kitchen. On an easel was a painting, to be called The King of the Campagna; all that was apparent was the head and horns of the king. Wardor had thus actually spent three mouths painting on a space not so large as your fist, while the canvas was at least three feet by two feet and a half. But the king, a buffalo, would be a regal figure, for the head was life itself.
Caper proposed finishing a bottle of wine with Wardor, in honor of the day; so the latter piloted him up street and then down a flight of steps to a quiet wine-shop, where, sitting on a shady terrace, they could calmly enjoy the lovely landscape spread below them, and look over the town, over the valley, to far-away Segni high up in the Volscians. The landlord's wife, a buxom, comely woman, in full holiday costume, brought them a flask of cool wine and glasses, presenting them at the same time with a couple of very large sweet apples, the largest of which was thirteen inches in circumference by actual measurement. So you see they have apples as well as oranges in Italy; only, apples are practical, so they are generally omitted in the poetical descriptions of the blue-skyed land.
Caper and Wardor dined together in a very crowded inn, where the maccaroni must have been cooked by the ton, to judge of the sized dish the two artists were presented with—and which they finished! Chickens, lamb chops, salad, and two flasks of wine at last satisfied them. When they left the table, Wardor proposed their calling on a Roman family, who were spending the summer in the town. They found the house they occupied crowded with guests, who, having finished dinner, were busily employed dancing to the music of two guitars and a flute; that is, the younger part of them, while the elders applauded vociferously, entering into the amusement with a reckless spirit of fun and good nature, which people who have to keep shady nine tenths of the year for fear of their rulers, are very apt to indulge in the remaining tenth.
Elisa, the daughter of the Roman family, received Caper with hearty welcome, chiding him for having been all summer at Segni, and yet not coming near them, and entreating him to come to Genazzano and make them a long visit. She introduced him at once to her affianced husband, a handsome young doctor of the town, a man of sterling ability and sound common sense, who very soon made Caper at home, insisted on his dancing the Tarantella and Saltarella Napolitana with a lively, lithe young lady, who cut our artist's heart to fiddlestrings before they had danced five minutes together a polka—for let the truth be told, Caper never could dance the Tarantella.
Wardor, in the meantime, had been led off in triumph to a side-table, and was making a very hearty second dinner; he not having force of mind enough to do like Caper and refuse a good offer! Caper had to drink a few tumblers (not wine-glasses) of wine, and found it beneficial in dancing. It may be as well to repeat here, in order to calm all apprehensions of our artist being a hard drinker, that all these wines around Rome, with few exceptions, are little stronger than mild sweet cider, and that satiety will generally arrive before inebriety. Ask any sober and rigorously correct traveller, who has ever been there, if this is not so. If he speaks from experience, he will say: 'Certainly!' 'Of course!' 'To be sure!' And again: 'Why not?'
It is not asserted here that the Romans of the city or surrounding country never get tipsy; but that it is only occasionally they have change enough to do so; consequently, a beautiful state of sobriety is observed by those travellers who—never observe anything.
The moon was shining over the old gate-towers of Genazzano when Caper mounted his horse, and, in company with two Segnians, rode forth from the fifth festa, and over the hills through Cavi, and over the valley past Valmontone, and then up the steep road to his summer home; wondering if in far-away America they were dreaming of a man who was going through a course of weekly Fourth-of-July's, and how long it would be before the world came to an end if such a state of things existed in any country where people had liberty to study geography, and were ruled by politicians instead of priests?
'May I ask your candid opinion of the great moral effect of so many holidays on an uneducated population?' inquired Caper one day of Rocjean, while speaking of the festivals of the Papal States.
'Certainly you may! My opinion is that the head of the state, carrying out the gigantic policy of his predecessors, believes: 'That that government governs best that gives the greatest amount of fiddling to the greatest amount of its children.''
'But,' objected Caper, 'I don't see where the fiddling comes in.'
'In the churches!' sententiously remarked the Sieur de Rocjean.
'Oh,' quoth Caper, 'I was thinking of festivals.'
Reader, do you think likewise, when you are with the Romans.
THOUGHT
Life is but an outer wall
Round the realm of thought unseen;
Ah! to let the drawbridge fall
Leading to that magic hall!
Ah! to let creation in.
Kings that with the world contended,
What remains of all the splendid
Misery their hands have wrought?
Hushed and silent now the thunder
They