The Bath In Which Our Chicken Had Been
Boiled Formed A Good Soup; There Was An Admirable _Pasta_ And A
Creditable, If Imperfect, Conception Of Beefsteak; And There Was A
Caraffe Of New Frascati Wine, Sweet, Like New Cider.
If we could have
asked more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer
who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed
me to weave a whole realtistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so
out of season.
Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver
alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The
occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was
his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was without
moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to
a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who
was almost as exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled
contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and
yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it
was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed
at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for
in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an
unalloyed delight.
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