Again We Were Deceived; At The End He Demanded A Franc
Beyond Even His Unnatural Fare.
I urged that one should be reasonable;
but he seemed to think not, and to avoid controversy I paid the
extortionate franc.
I remembered that just a month before, in New York,
I had paid an extortionate dollar in like circumstances.
Nevertheless, that franc above and beyond the stipulated extortion
impoverished me, and when we came to take a rowboat back to our steamer
I beat the boatman down cruelly, mercilessly. He was a poor, lean little
man, with rather a superannuated boat, and he labored harder at the oar
than I could bear to see without noting his exertion to him. This was
fatal; instantly he owned that I was right, and he confessed, moreover,
that he was the father of a family, and that some of his children were
then suffering from sickness as well as want. What could one do but make
the fare up to the first demand of three francs after having got the
price down to one and a half? At the time it seemed to me that I was
somehow by this means getting the better of the cabman who had obliged
me to pay a franc more than his stipulated extortion, but I do not now
hope to make it appear so to the reader.
IV
NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE
We heard the joyful noise of Naples as soon as our steamer came to
anchor within the moles whose rigid lines perhaps disfigure her famous
bay, while they render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose to us,
hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory of her
sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which seemed to
have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It was not
a largo boat, but it managed to contain two men with mandolins, a mother
of a family with a guitar, and a young girl with an alternate tambourine
and umbrella. The last instrument was inverted to catch the coins, such
as they were, which the passengers flung down to the minstrels for their
repetitions of "Santa Lucia," "Funicoli-Funicola," "II Cacciatore," and
other popular Neapolitan airs, such as "John Brown's Body" and "In the
Bowery." To the songs that had a waltz movement the mother of a family
performed a restricted dance, at some risk of falling overboard, while
she smiled radiantly up at us, as, in fact, they all did, except the
young girl, who had to play simultaneously on her tambourine and her
inverted umbrella, and seemed careworn. Her anxiety visibly deepened to
despair when she missed a shilling, which must have looked as large to
her as a full moon as it sank slowly down into the sea.
But her despair did not last long; nothing lasts long in Naples except
the joyful noise, which is incessant and perpetual, and which seems the
expression of the universal temperament in both man and beast.
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