sed
Mr. Dod.

The Senator, momma, and Mrs. Portheris stood in the cathedral door.
Isabel and Mr. Mafferton occupied the middle distance. Mr. Mafferton
stooped to add a poppy to a slender handful of wild flowers he held out
to her. Isabel was looking back.

"It will be pleasant inside the Duomo," I said. "Let us go on. I feel
warm. I agree with you that the situation is serious, Dicky. Look at
those poppies! When an Englishman does that you may make up your mind to
the worst. But I don't think anybody need have the slightest respect for
the affections of Mr. Mafferton."

Inside the Duomo it was pleasant, and cool, and there was a dim
religious light that gave one an opportunity for reflection. I was so
much engaged in reflection that I failed to notice the shape of the
Duomo, but I have since learned that it was a basilica, in the form of
a Latin cross, and was simply full of things which should have claimed
my attention. Momma took copious notes from which I see that the Madonna
and Child holy water basin was perfectly sweet, and the episcopal throne
by Uervellesi in 1536 was the finest piece of tarsia work in the world,
and the large bronze hanging lamp by Vincenzo Possento was the object
which assisted Galileo to invent the oscillations of the pendulum. The
Senator was much taken with the inlaid wooden stalls in the choir, the
subjects were so lively. He and his Aunt Caroline nearly came to words
over a monkey regarding its reflection in a looking glass, done with a
realism which Mrs. Portheris considered little short of profane, but
which poppa found quite an excusable filip to devotions which must have
been such an all day business in the sixteenth century. Outside,
however, poppa found it difficult to approve the facade. To throw four
galleries over the street door, he said, with no visible means of
getting into them or possible object for sitting there, was about the
most ridiculous waste of building space he had yet observed.

"But then," said Dicky Dod, who kept his disconsolate place by my side,
"they didn't seem to know how to waste enough in those pre-elevator
days. Look at the pictures and the bronzes and the marble columns inside
there--ten times as much as they had any use for. They just heaped it
up."

"That's so, Dicky, my boy," replied poppa; "we could cover more ground
with the money in our century. But you've got to remember that they
hadn't any other way worth mentioning of spending the taxes.