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Updated: June 2, 2025
So the summer swept rapidly on. The remodelled stone mansion was finished at last and daintily furnished to meet every requirement. There were school-rooms and work-rooms and play-rooms. There were parlors and pianos and piazzas. There were long windows and wide doors everywhere. The whole place was filled with sunshine and fresh air.
The girl's methods were simple and so organized as to make one hand wash the other. Her house had some twenty-odd bedrooms, full accommodations for kitchen and laundry work on a large scale, big dining, dancing, and reception rooms, and broad shady piazzas on the sides.
There are fat women who rock and rock on piazzas by the sea, and they speak of country people as the 'lower classes. How happy this big family is in not knowing it is the lower classes!" "We haven't read Nordau down here," said John. "Old Tom Martin's favorite work is 'The Descent of Man. Miss Tibbs admires Tupper, and 'Beulah, and some of us possess the works of E. P. Roe and why not?"
The "gentle incorporation into the scenery of Nature," that Wordsworth demands, is the most difficult point to effect, as well as the most needful. This makes the importance of a background of trees, of shrubs, and creepers, and the uniting lines of sheds, piazzas, etc., mediating and easing off the shock which the upstart mass inflicts upon the eye.
Indeed, from beneath its low-hooded porticos and piazzas nothing else could be seen except, perhaps, the wide sky gray, mottled, or intensely blue, as the weather permitted the stretch of white sand shaded from dry to wet and edged with tufts of yellow grass; the circling gulls and the tall finger of Barnegat Light pointing skyward. This view Lucy always enjoyed.
Florence is a noble city, that still retains all the marks of a majestic capital, such as piazzas, palaces, fountains, bridges, statues, and arcades. I need not tell you that the churches here are magnificent, and adorned not only with pillars of oriental granite, porphyry, Jasper, verde antico, and other precious stones; but also with capital pieces of painting by the most eminent masters.
They left the great towns gradually behind; each succeeding one seemed more simply rural. Young girls were gathered on the platforms at the little stations where they stopped sometimes; it was the grand excitement of the place, the coming of the train, and to these village lasses was what the piazzas or the springs are to gay dwellers at Saratoga.
Like the sudden flippant clatter of castanets in the pause of some solemn funeral music was the impression given by the first glimpse along the winding woodland way of a great flimsy white building, with its many pillars, its piazzas, its "observatory," its band-stand, its garish intimations of the giddy, gay world of a summer hotel. But, alack! it, too, had its surfeit of woe.
Scarcely had this smoke appeared, to vanish almost immediately, when all the innumerable crowd, knowing well that there was nothing else to wait for, and that all was said and done until ten o'clock the next morning, the time when the cardinals had their first voting, went off in a tumult of noisy joking, just as they would after the last rocket of a firework display; so that at the end of one minute nobody was there where a quarter of an hour before there had been an excited crowd, except a few curious laggards, who, living in the neighbourhood or on the very piazza itself; were less in a hurry than the rest to get back to their homes; again, little by little, these last groups insensibly diminished; for half-past nine had just struck, and at this hour the streets of Rome began already to be far from safe; then after these groups followed some solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after another the doors were closed, one after another the windows were darkened; at last, when ten o'clock struck, with the single exception of one window in the Vatican where a lamp might be seen keeping obstinate vigil, all the houses, piazzas, and streets were plunged in the deepest obscurity.
The house, as I said, was a very elegant edifice of white free-stone; it was two stories in height, and had airy piazzas running the whole length of the front, both above and below; a stately portico occupied the center of the lower piazza, having on each side of it the tall windows of the drawing-rooms.
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