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The building, a heavy many-windowed pile in the worst style of the worst Renaissance period, stood, and still stands, in a fat, flat country about ten miles from Cologne, to which city it bears much the same relation that Hampton Court bears to London, or Versailles to Paris. Stucco and whitewash had been lavished upon it inside and out, and pallid scagliola did duty everywhere for marble.
Laburnum Villa was in a long street, which resembled the other streets as one tree resembles another; and you had to traverse a great many of these streets before you got into the open country, that is, away from the red-bricked and stucco villas, and still smaller and uglier houses, which had been run up by the enterprising jerry-builder.
Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin helmet like those which grace the heads of officers of the Italian marine, and a coat of many colours embellished with strange devices, adorn the outward man of this stately personage.
Still a third meddler had tried to make it over into a colonial homestead by painting the stucco white and joining on an enormous columned porch.
As you swing in you pass an odd-shaped vine-covered affair that I suppose was meant for a gate-keeper's lodge, though it looks like a stucco tower that had been dropped off some storage warehouse. Well, we'd just made the turn and Mr.
Florence at first struck me as having the aspect of a very new city in comparison with Rome; but, on closer acquaintance, I find that many of the buildings are antique and massive, though still the clear atmosphere, the bright sunshine, the light, cheerful hues of the stucco, and as much as anything else, perhaps the vivacious character of the human life in the streets, take away the sense of its being an ancient city.
There was no sound or sight that would seem to indicate the vicinity of any human being, as Arvina, passing the mouth of a small gorge or hollow scooped out of the bosom of a soft green hill, paused at the arch of a low but richly ornamented grotto, hollowed out of the face of the rock, and supported by a vault of reticulated brick-work, decorated elegantly with reliefs of marble and rich stucco.
These surfaces of ivory and silver, of stucco or marble, of wood or canvas, pottery or porcelain, on which the human mind, in love with some fraction of the beauty interwoven with the world, had stamped an impress of itself, sometimes exquisite, sometimes whimsical, sometimes riotous above all, living, life reaching to life, through the centuries: these, from a refuge or an amusement, had become an abiding delight, something, moreover, that seemed to point to a definite lifework paid honourably by cash as well as pleasure.
The building, which is of a comparatively modern date, consisted of two chambers, an outer one which was empty, and an inner one containing the tomb built of bricks, covered with white stucco and enclosed in a wooden case, over which was thrown a large blue cloth fringed with yellow tassels with the name of the donor embroidered on it in Hebrew characters.
The high dormer windows were partially closed by old wooden shutters, warped, split, and in every stage of dilapidation; broken stones filled up the loop-holes and openings in the towers; of the twelve large windows in the front of the house, eight were boarded up; the remaining four had small diamond-shaped panes of thick, greenish glass, fitting so loosely in their leaden frames that they shook and rattled at every breath of wind; between these windows a great deal of the stucco had fallen off, leaving the rough wall exposed to view.
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