The Roman Beggars Are Of All Claims Upon Pity, But Preferably I
Should Say They Were Blind, And Some Of These Are Quite Young Girls, And
Mostly Rather Cheerful.
But the very gayest beggar I remember was a
legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen
dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of
twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.
XII
SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES
It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so
dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of
patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in
their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of
the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt
which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us
uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in
February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio
unexpectedly near; I found the sunshine; I found the familiar winter
warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in
ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had
narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round
faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that
series of apparent principessas or imaginable marchesas leaning at their
lovely lengths in their landaus.
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