s absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing;
any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the
good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors
crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the
gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed,
to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table
to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their
knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so
bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young
girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the
plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful,
with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself
to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward
to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes
protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be
when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her
summer.

I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably
modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans
who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these
rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the
Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first
night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after
breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no
more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of
those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not
at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any
condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot
what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten
upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have
made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is
very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses,
and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to
note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great
many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time
Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been
cultivat