Everything new is to them
wonderful, just as it is to a child. They are credulous of everything
you tell them about America, which is to them in some measure what it
was to the English in the days of Raleigh, Drake, and Hawkins, and say
"_Per Bacco!_" to every new statement. And they are so magnificently
ignorant, that you have _carte blanche_ for your stories. Never did I
know any one staggered by anything I chose to say, but once. I was
walking with my respectable old _padrone_, Nisi, about his little
garden one day, when an ambition to know something about America
inflamed his breast.
"Are there any mountains?" he asked.
I told him "Yes," and, with a chuckle of delight, he cried,--
"_Per Bacco!_ And have you any cities?"
"Yes, a few little ones,"--for I thought I would sing small, contrary
to the general "'Ercles vein" of my countrymen. He was evidently
pleased that they were small, and, swelling with natural pride, said,--
"Large as Rome, of course, they could not be"; then, after a moment, he
added, interrogatively, "And rivers, too,--have you any rivers?"
"A few," I answered.
"But not as large as our Tiber," he replied,--feeling assured, that, if
the cities were smaller than Rome, as a necessary consequence, the
rivers that flowed by them must be in the same category.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215