pishness of
common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of
their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.

We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops
at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.

We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place,
as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not
have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the
clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our
compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the
garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines,
dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing
his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this
way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired
a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the
empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all
that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking
silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those
drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they
had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de'
Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if
a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.

* * * * *

On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together
our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then
we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the
effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica.
We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently
passed over; and it was not until we came to the s