We Often Encountered, In These Expeditions, A Company Of English
Tourists, With Whom I Had An Ardent, But Ungratified Longing, To
Establish A Speaking Acquaintance.
They were one Mr. Davis, and a
small circle of friends.
It was impossible not to know Mrs.
Davis's name, from her being always in great request among her
party, and her party being everywhere. During the Holy Week, they
were in every part of every scene of every ceremony. For a
fortnight or three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and
every church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I
hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment. Deep
underground, high up in St. Peter's, out on the Campagna, and
stifling in the Jews' quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the same.
I don't think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything;
and she had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket, and
was trying to find it, with all her might and main, among an
immense quantity of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon
the sea-shore, at the bottom of it. There was a professional
Cicerone always attached to the party (which had been brought over
from London, fifteen or twenty strong, by contract), and if he so
much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably cut him short by
saying, 'There, God bless the man, don't worrit me! I don't
understand a word you say, and shouldn't if you was to talk till
you was black in the face!' Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured
great-coat on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and
had a slow curiosity constantly devouring him, which prompted him
to do extraordinary things, such as taking the covers off urns in
tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they were pickles--and
tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and
saying, with intense thoughtfulness, 'Here's a B you see, and
there's a R, and this is the way we goes on in; is it!' His
antiquarian habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of
the rest; and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the party in
general, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost.
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