In Any Case, Though There Was Shouting By Night, And Some Singing Of Not At All The Neapolitan Quality And Still Less The Neapolitan Quantity, There Was No Laughing, Or, As Far As I Could See, Smiling By Day.

Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman dog.

It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then a cabman drove out of the mellay very excitedly, and then turned and drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another's backs and their heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders. On the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one of those strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples, with red- braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those carabinieres - namely, who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace. Any spectator from a foreign land would have thought it the business of such an officer of the law to press in and stop the fighting; but he did not so interpret his duty.

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