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The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet losing money by it all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the land.
"One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!" bowing right and left. "Look at that adorable wine-cart! How the driver stares at us, dear, simple soul!" So Miss Lavish proceeded through the streets of the city of Florence, short, fidgety, and playful as a kitten, though without a kitten's grace.
By the flare of them they saw that hundreds of people were gathered there listening to a mad-eyed friar who was preaching to them from the top of a wine-cart.
Here and there, in the streets, a wine-cart was halting on its way to Rome, while the rough carter went through the usual arrangement of exchanging some of his employer's wine for food for himself, filling up the barrel with good pure water that never hurt anyone.
A cordon of sentinels surrounded the bivouac; there was a group of soldiers around a beer-cart, another throng near the wine-cart. All was quiet, orderly, and terribly sombre. Near the poplar-trees the pioneers had dug their trenches and lighted fires. Across the trenches, on poles of green wood, were slung simmering camp-kettles.
Opposite was a booth of coloured candies, dried figs strung on a reed, and various kinds of sweets. A wine-cart passed, and Kennedy made Caesar observe how decorative it was with its big arm-seat in the middle and its hood above, like a prompter's box. Giovanni Battista ordered a flask of wine for the three of them. While he chatted and drank, friends of his came to greet them.
It was all very much the same, but between that time and this there lay all Ercole's life by the Roman shore. When he had heard, as every one had, how Marcello had been brought to Rome on the tail of a wine-cart, he had been sure that the boy had been laid upon it while the cart was standing before Paoluccio's inn in the night.
Their intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations, and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy! You cannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousand years' sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier who is even half awake! As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a curious experience.
In the busiest street of Rome, the pure Campagna song may often be heard from the throat of some contadino, as he slowly rumbles along in his loaded wine-cart, the little dog at his side barking a sympathetic chorus. This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the Church chant.
"I delegated all our arrangements to my companion; and it was something wonderful to see Mr. Carter lolling in his arm-chair with what he called the 'wine-cart' in his hand, deliberating between a forty-two port, 'light and elegant, and a forty-five port, 'tawny and rich bouquet.
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