Elsewhere The Tram-Line That Curved Upward To Fras-Cati Was Flanked,
After It Left The Campagna's Level, With Vineyards As Measureless As The
Olive Orchards Of Tivoli.
There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of
leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of
canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the
hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops.
The eye wearied
itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the
Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but
never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we
call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from
the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination,
our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful
square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on
the sidewalks before them.
We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our
eyes from feasting, even at eleven o'clock in the morning, on the
wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more
immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged
about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the
cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we
could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and
still fared well; but we chose the best - a glittering victoria and an
animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of
joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some
others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental
vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse's
headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his
company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition
that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city;
because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they
ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards
of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole
day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he
only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.
We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the
attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and
our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that
concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him
that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable
villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through
the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if
unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.
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