rror it occurred to
Dickens, however, that four more hours of this kind of entertainment
would be too much; that the Genoa gates closed at twelve; and that as
the carriage had not been ordered till the dancing was expected to be
over and the gates to reopen, he must make a sudden bolt if he would
himself get back to Albaro. "I had barely time," he told me, "to reach
the gate before midnight; and was running as hard as I could go,
down-hill, over uneven ground, along a new street called the strada
Sevra, when I came to a pole fastened straight across the street, nearly
breast high, without any light or watchman--quite in the Italian style.
I went over it, headlong, with such force that I rolled myself
completely white in the dust; but although I tore my clothes to shreds,
I hardly scratched myself except in one place on the knee. I had no time
to think of it then, for I was up directly and off again to save the
gate: but when I got outside the wall, and saw the state I was in, I
wondered I had not broken my neck. I 'took it easy' after this, and
walked home, by lonely ways enough, without meeting a single soul. But
there is nothing to be feared, I believe, from midnight walks in this
part of Italy. In other places you incur the danger of being stabbed by
mistake; whereas the people here are quiet and good tempered, and very
rarely commit any outrage."

Such adventures, nevertheless, are seldom without consequences, and
there followed in this case a short but sharp attack of illness. It came
on with the old "unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side," for which
Bob Fagin had prepared and applied the hot bottles in the old warehouse
time; and it yielded quickly to powerful remedies. But for a few days he
had to content himself with the minor sights of Albaro. He sat daily in
the shade of the ruined chapel on the seashore. He looked in at the
festa in the small country church, consisting mainly of a tenor singer,
a seraphine, and four priests sitting gaping in a row on one side of the
altar "in flowered satin dresses and little cloth caps, looking exactly
like the band at a wild-beast-caravan." He was interested in the
wine-making, and in seeing the country tenants preparing their annual
presents for their landlords, of baskets of grapes and other fruit
prettily dressed with flowers. The season of the grapes, too, brought
out after dusk strong parties of rats to eat them as they ripened, and
so many shooting parties of pea