We Were Unable To Make Out Just What Sort, Or To Join In It
Without Knowing, Though It Lasted Well Toward Morning, And We Were Up
Often During The Night To See That The Fire Did Not Die Out Of Our One
Porcelain Stove And Leave Us To Perish Of Cold.
In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this
sweeping verdict may be true
If taken in the sense that one is as good
as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in
Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only
obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this
was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its
frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible
warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and
having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our
apartment. We had our landlord's company at supper, and had learned from
him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not
otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn,
of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and
commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a
millionaire of that princely quality. After that we were not so much
surprised as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited
by our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two
_scaldini,_ which were bristling before her where she knelt when we
opened the door upon her.
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