



Produced by Eric Eldred






[Illustration: 01 GLIMPSE OUTSIDE OF MODERN ROME]


ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

By W. D. Howells

ILLUSTRATED





  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
  Copyright, 1908, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.
  Published October, 1908.




CONTENTS


I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA

II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN

III. ASHORE AT GENOA

IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE

V. POMPEII REVISITED

VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

VIII. OVER AT PISA

IX.. BACK AT GENOA

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL





ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS




I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.


No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly
imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and
gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of
Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful
afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very
boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had
certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the
theatre, while studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of
the orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which
the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent
itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his
thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous
reality before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea,
which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those precipices
and grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow and green, while
half a score of cascades shot straight down their fronts in shafts of
snowy foam, and over their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung
long reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from the sea the
island is all, with its changing capes and promontories and bays and
inlets, one immeasurable mountain; and on the afternoon of our approach
it was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of which we could only see one
leg indeed, but that very stout and athletic.

There were breadths of dark woodland aloft on this mountain, and
terraced vineyards lower down; and on the shelving plateaus yet farther
from the heights that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered
white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there were set white
villas. These, as the ship coquetted with the vagaries of the shore,
thickened more and more, until after rounding a prodigious headland we
found ourselves in face of the charming little city of Funchal: long
horizontal lines of red roofs, ivory and pink and salmon walls, evenly
fenestrated, with an ancient fortress giving the modern look of things a
proper mediaeval touch. Large hotels, with the air of palaces, crowned
the upland vantages; there were bell-towers of churches, and in one
place there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red of the
densely flowering creeper on the side of some favored house. There was
an acceptable expanse of warm brown near the quay from the withered but
unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade, and in the fine
roadstead where we anchored there lay other steamers and a lead-
Portuguese war-ship. I am not a painter, but I think that here are the
materials of a water-color which almost any one else could paint. In the
hands of a scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled
drop-curtain. I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful
goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves you not only
sated but vindictive; you wish to mock it.

The afternoon saddened more and more, and one could not take an interest
in the islanders who came out in little cockles and proposed to dive for
shillings and sixpences, though quarters and dimes would do. The
company's tender also came out, and numbers of passengers went ashore in
the mere wantonness of paying for their dinner and a night's lodging in
the annexes of the hotels, which they were told beforehand were full.
The lights began to twinkle from the windows of the town, and the dark
fell upon the insupportable picturesqueness of the prospect, leaving one
to a gayety of trooping and climbing lamps which defined the course of
the streets.

The morning broke in sunshine, and after early breakfast the launches
began to ply again between the ship and the shore and continued till
nearly all the first and second cabin people had been carried off. The
people of the steerage satisfied what longing they had for strange
sights and scenes by thronging to the sides of the steamer until they
gave her a strong list landward, as they easily might, for there were
twenty-five hundred of them. At Madeira there is a local Thomas Cook &
Son of quite another name, but we were not finally sure that the alert
youth on the pier who sold us transportation and provision was really
their agent. However, his tickets served perfectly well at all points,
and he was of such an engaging civility and personal comeliness that I
should not have much minded their failing us here and there. He gave the
first charming-touch of the Latin south whose renewed contact is such a
pleasure to any one knowing it from the past. All Portuguese as Funchal
was, it looked so like a hundred little Italian towns that it seemed to
me as if I must always have driven about them in calico-tented
bullock-carts set on runners, as later I drove about Eunchal.

It was warm enough on the ship, but here in the town we found ourselves
in weather that one could easily have taken for summer, if the
inhabitants had not repeatedly assured us that it was the season of
winter, and that there were no flowers and no fruits. They could not, if
they had wished, have denied the flies; these, in a hotel interior to
which we penetrated, simply swarmed. If it was winter in Funchal it was
no wintrier than early autumn would have been in one of those Italian
towns of other days; it had the same temperament, the same little
tree-planted spaces, the same devious, cobble-paved streets, the same
pleasant stucco houses; the churches had bells of like tone, and if
their facades confessed a Spanish touch they were not more Spanish than
half the churches in Naples. The public ways were of a scrupulous
cleanliness, as if, with so many English signs glaring down at them,
they durst not untidy out-of-doors, though in-doors it was said to be
different with them. There are three thousand English living at Funchal
and everybody speaks English, however slightly. The fresh faces of
English girls met us in the streets and no doubt English invalids
abound.

We shipmates were all going to the station of the funicular railway, but
our tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a clattering
little horse-car, which climbed with us through up-hill streets and got
us to the station too soon. Within the closed grille there the
handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if
such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once,
though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a
train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most
amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we
would have liked to think