e way that we should go," by leading us
down a steep flight of steps, which landed us on the _piano nobile_.
This, for the present, was tenanted by a set of weavers, to whom the
principal floor of the _palazzo_ had been let for a short term. They had
proved but turbulent occupants, being in a constant state of
refractoriness against their landlords, the bachelor brothers, who
seemed to be somewhat in awe of them. On the present occasion, for
instance, the brothers apologized for being unable to show us the grand
saloon, as the weavers (whom we could hear, while he spoke, singing in a
loud, uproarious, insurgent kind of way, that might well have drawn
three souls out of one of their own craft, and evidently made the souls
of their two landlords quail) did not like to be disturbed.

Their contumacious voices, mingled with the clamor of their looms, died
off in the distance, while we proceeded down the back staircase to the
ground-floor. We at first fancied that this apparently surreptitious
proceeding was perhaps traceable to the awe entertained by the bachelor
brothers for their unruly tenants; but we were relieved from the sense
of acting in a style bordering on poltroonery, by finding that the
principal staircase had been boarded up to preserve its marble steps and
sides from injury. On arriving at the foot we found ourselves in a
spacious hall, opposite the approach to the grand staircase, which
looked like an archway built for giants, toweringly defined above the
scaffold-planks by which it was barricaded. Many doors opened from this
hall, to each of which, in turn, one of the bachelor brothers applied
successive keys from a ponderous bunch that he held in his hand. These
doors led to vast suites of apartments, all unfurnished, like the upper
rooms, with the exception of one suite, which the brothers had lent to a
friend of theirs, and which was sparely supplied with some old Italian
furniture, of so antique a fashion that each article might have been a
family heirloom ever since the times of that famous Genoese gentleman,
Christopher Columbus. One peculiarity the four remarked, which spoke
volumes for the geniality of the climate: in all this huge rambling
edifice they saw only one room which could boast of a fireplace. The
sun's warmth evidently supplied all the heat necessary, and--as might be
conjectured from its other peculiarities as well as this--anything like
what the English call "the joys and comforts of the