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The lupines were shaking their blue heads distressfully at the impertinence; and then here came the vaqueros galloping, and even the lupines and poppies forgot their dispute in the excitement of watching the fun. As the roundups of our modern cattlemen "ride circle," so did those velvet-jacketed, silver-braided horsemen gallop forth in pairs from a common center that was the chosen rodeo ground.
From the velvet-jacketed figures lounging motionless in the shadows of the open doorways so motionless that only the lazy drift of cigarette smoke betokened their breathing to the reclining peons in the shade of a catalpa, or the squatting Indians in the arroyo all was sloth and dirt. The Rev. Stephen Masterton felt his throat swell with his old exhortative indignation.
It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets in Boston, with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at their ground-floor windows; with mouldering archways between the buildings, and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna; with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and love-making maidens furtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth below: a place haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, the travelled reader pleases to imagine.
There was the polite English society, the society that flocks to see the Colosseum lighted up with blue fire, that flocks to the Vatican to behold the statues by torchlight, that hustles into the churches on public festivals in black veils and deputy-lieutenants' uniforms, and stares, and talks, and uses opera-glasses while the pontiffs of the Roman Church are performing its ancient rites, and the crowds of faithful are kneeling round the altars; the society which gives its balls and dinners, has its scandal and bickerings, its aristocrats, parvenus, toadies imported from Belgravia; has its club, its hunt, and its Hyde Park on the Pincio: and there is the other little English world, the broad-hatted, long-bearded, velvet-jacketed, jovial colony of the artists, who have their own feasts, haunts, and amusements by the side of their aristocratic compatriots, with whom but few of them have the honour to mingle.
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