ossible to rouse me. Then day
or night, rain or sunshine, Tyrol or Italy, it was all the same;
I swayed first to the right, then to the left, then backward--nay,
sometimes my head nodded down so low that my hat dropped off, and Herr
Guido screamed aloud.

Thus we had passed, I hardly know how, half through the part of
Italy that they call Lombardy, when on a fine evening we stopped at
a country inn. The post-horses were to be ready for us at the
neighboring station in a couple of hours, so the painters left the
carriage, and were shown into a special apartment, to rest a little,
and to write some letters. I was greatly pleased, and betook myself
to the common room to eat and drink in comfort. Here everything looked
rather disreputable: the maids were going about with their hair in
disorder and their neckerchiefs awry, exposing their sallow skin;
the men-servants were at their supper in blue smock-frocks, around a
circular table, whence they glowered at me from time to time. They all
wore their hair tied behind in a short, thick queue which looked quite
dandified. "Here you are," I said to myself, as I ate my supper, "here
you are in the country from which such queer people used to come to
the Herr Pastor's with mouse-traps, and barometers, and pictures. How
much a man learns who makes up his mind not to stick close to his own
hearth-stone all his life!"

As I was thus eating my supper and meditating, a little man, who had
been sitting in a dim corner of the room over a glass of wine, darted
out of his nook at me like a spider. He was quite short and crooked,
and he had a big ugly head, with a long hooked nose and sparse red
whiskers, while his powdered hair stood on end all over his head as
if a hurricane had swept over it. He wore an old-fashioned, threadbare
dress-coat, short, plush breeches, and faded silk stockings. He had
once been in Germany, and prided himself upon his knowledge of German.
He sat down by me and asked a hundred questions, perpetually taking
snuff the while--Was I the _servitore_? When did we arrive? Had we
gone to Roma? All this I myself did not know, and really I could not
understand his gibberish. "_Parlez-vous francais_?" I asked him at
last in my distress. He shook his big head, and I was very glad, for
neither did I speak French. But it was of no use, he had taken me in
hand, and went on asking question after question; the more we parleyed
the less we understood each other, until at last we