A Cabman Whom We Eliminated From The Hysterical Company Of His
Fellows And Persuaded To Drive Us Away To See A Church Attempted To
Ignore The Whole Affair When Asked About It.
With difficulty he could be
made to recollect it, and then he dismissed it as a trifle.
"Oh," he
said, "chiacchiere di donnic-ciuole," which is something like "Clatter
of little old women," a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could
believe him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not
talk about it.
Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the
public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman, who
owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break through the
crowd and arrest the fighters. "They had knives," he explained, and it
seemed a good reason for the cara-biniere's forbearance, as far as it
went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish
policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had
himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a
pleasant remove and said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill
each other," and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of
an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them
kill."
I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to
me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our
own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who
left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.
It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a
vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the
other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I
saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to.
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