I Saw Some Small Boys In Steeple-Crowned Soft Hats And Short
Jackets, With Their Little Legs Wound Round With
The favorite bandaging
of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes
at the breast; there was a
Patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to
pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons;
but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls,
fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below
those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds
in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there
is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of
alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied
escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he
joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are
capable; he wore a soldier's cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our
species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.
On a Sunday evening I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye
the people who were coining back from their promenade on the Pincian
Hill, and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps.
On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I dare
say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a little
dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the circus.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 123 of 353
Words from 33808 to 34074
of 97259
