If you want coffee, you go to
a sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will probably find
It
behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps, in some
sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison,
and Genoa's law were death to any that uttered it.
Most of the apothecaries' shops are great lounging-places. Here,
grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together,
passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking,
drowsily and sparingly, about the News. Two or three of these are
poor physicians, ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and
tear off with any messenger who may arrive. You may know them by
the way in which they stretch their necks to listen, when you
enter; and by the sigh with which they fall back again into their
dull corners, on finding that you only want medicine. Few people
lounge in the barbers' shops; though they are very numerous, as
hardly any man shaves himself. But the apothecary's has its group
of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their hands
folded over the tops of their sticks. So still and quiet, that
either you don't see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them--as
I did one ghostly man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a
stopper--for Horse Medicine.
On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves,
as their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch
of space in and about the town.
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