It Was Not Dangerous, And
The Whole Affair Ended So.
Besides, as I learned, still longer
afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand
To
speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna,
who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the
bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six
glasses of when they visit Rome. "What we call benzine," my cabman
explained. "We Romans," he added from a moral height, "drink only a
glass or two of wine, and we never carry knives."
He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and
their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent
scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our
cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver snatched
me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was
really any, quickly passed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who
had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty
which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the
wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me
from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, "E roba
mia!" (He's my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen,
but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 184 of 353
Words from 50420 to 50684
of 97259
