These Burst From Time To Time The
Thin Film Of Sleep Which Formed Like A Coating Of Ice Over The
Consciousness, And Then One Could Only Get Up And Put More Wood Into The
Despairing Stove And More Clothes On The Beds.
Well for us that we had
thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of
Abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day!
But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we
shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of
those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the
growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as
sensible - the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago.
It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that
naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was
opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to
bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.
It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was
somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for
the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make
Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the
winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for
the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only
for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I
should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I
did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no
room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of
luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of
the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and
there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the
sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun
as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which
diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and
hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which
imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only
agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open
sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from
one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making
us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by
palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our
unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if
I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity
which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be
comfortably lodged or fed again.
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