Women with the square linen
head-dress of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each
with his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking
backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a horse or a
mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and both man and beast
are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to the automobile. Now and
then a carter would set his team slantwise in our course and stay us out
of good-humored deviltry, and when he let us pass would fling some chaff
to the fresh-faced English youngster who was our chauffeur.
"I suppose you don't always understand what those fellows say," I
suggested from my seat beside him.
"No, sir," he confessed. "But I give it to 'em back in English," he
added, joyously.
He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp,
broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that
there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an
opinion of the government's motives in the matter with respect to
motors, as if he thought them bad.
