There Was A German Couple And
There Were Some French-Speaking People; The Rest Of Us Were Bound In The
Tie Of Our Common English.
The agent of the enterprise accompanied us,
an international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat the
middle-
Aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when we made
our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in three
languages - successively, of course - concerning the Column of Marcus
Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American confrere; and
from the shudder which the first sound of his voice must have sent
through a less fastidious substance than mine I perceived that an
address by megaphone I could not have borne; to that extreme of excess
even my modernism could not go. As it was, there was an instant when I
could have wished to be on foot, or even in a cab, with a red Baedeker
in my hand; and yet, as the orator went on, I had to own that he was
giving me a better account of the column than I could have got for
myself out of the guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian
accent and occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and
then in a German which suffered from his knowledge of English.
He sat down, looking rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our
next stop, at the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our
necessities in the article of language.
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