The Weather Had Grown A Little More Wintry, Or, At Least,
Autumnal, As The Season Advanced Toward Spring, And One Day At The End
Of February, When We Were Passing A Woody Hollow, The Fallen Leaves
Stirred Crisply With A Sound Like That Of Late October At Home.
We had
been at some pains and expense to put home four thousand miles away, but
this sound was
The sweetest and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it
strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities,
the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region
glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had
fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But
there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium,
with its gra-dines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some
young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ungenuine in
the rapture of the boy whom we saw racing through the dead leaves of
that woody hollow in chase of the wild fancies that fly before boyhood;
and I hope that the charm of the plinths and statues in the careless
grounds behind the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any
rate, these things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now
thickly starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being original.
When we came last the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones,
which seem a greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color,
like cheap calico.
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