The Sort Of Palaces Which We
Call Cottages In Our Summer Cities, And The Italians Call Casinos From
The Same Instinctive Modesty.
When we began to doubt of our destination,
our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful
square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on
the sidewalks before them.
We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our
eyes from feasting, even at eleven o'clock in the morning, on the
wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more
immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged
about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the
cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we
could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and
still fared well; but we chose the best - a glittering victoria and an
animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of
joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some
others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental
vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse's
headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his
company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition
that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city;
because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they
ought logically to be dearer.
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