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Updated: May 15, 2025
About this time people who frequented the Cascine Gardens and other popular drives in and about Florence began to notice with interest an elegant equipage containing a tall, slender, pale young man, two beautiful, brown-eyed girls, and oftentimes either a gray-haired woman in black or a sunny-haired young girl.
An attempt had been made to throw a shell into the ball-room, which had happily failed. The streets were immediately lined with soldiers, and the ball, which was given by the Ministers, as far as I recollect, took place. When the war broke out, a large body of French troops, commanded by Prince Jerôme Napoleon, came to Florence, and were bivouacked in the Cascine.
He went out and walked down the Lung' Arno toward the Cascine. The sun danced on the river, and bathed the long line of pale buff and grey houses that followed its curve, and ceased in the mist of leafless tree-tops where the Cascine began.
There is no crush along the Cascine, as on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture in a bad light.
Now I have the Coronation of the Czar, the Millennial at Hungary, the Inauguration at Washington, the Queen's Jubilee, the War in Cuba, and the Greco-Turkish War. That is a good year's work and I mean to loaf after it. You will laugh and say that that is what I always say, but if you knew how I had to kick myself out of Florence and the Cascine to come here you would believe me.
The Cascine is a Bois also in having a race-course in it a small course with everything about it on a little scale, grandstand, betting boxes, and all. And why not? for after all Florence is quite small in size, however remarkable in character. Here funny little race-meetings are held, beginning on Easter Monday and continuing at intervals until the weather gets too hot.
For Florence is comparatively a small city. A good pedestrian can easily walk from Porta Romana on the south to Porta Gallo on the north; or from Porta San Niccolo on the east, along the banks of the Arno, to the Cascine Gardens on the west.
His host or more frequently it was his hostess had sometimes merely an apartment at a hotel; perhaps the family was established in one of the furnished lodgings which stretch the whole length of the Lung' Arno on either hand, and abound in all the new streets approaching the Cascine, and had set up the simple and facile housekeeping of the sojourner in Florence for a few months; others had been living in the villa or the palace they had taken for years.
Colville remembered how the minds of girls of twenty had once dazzled him. "And yes," he mused, "she must have believed that we were talking literature in the Cascine. Certainly I should have thought it an intellectual time when I was at that age," he owned to himself with forlorn irony. The young fellows went on to speak of Mrs. Bowen, whom it seemed they had known the winter before.
Hawthorne seemed to have a fixed preference for calling supper, it was Gerald who did most of the talking. The ladies abandoned the lead to him, and listened with flattering attention while he called into use his not too sadly rusted social gifts. He related what he knew about the Indian Prince whose monument at the far end of the Cascine had roused their interest. He explained the Misericordia.
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