Fireside Travels Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 Excerpt: ...and now far away; a solitary Jew with a sack over his shoulder, and who never is seen to stop, slouches along, every now and then croaking a penitential Cenci as if he were somehow the embodied expiation (by some post-Ovidian metamorphosis) of that darkest Roman tragedy; women are bargaining for lettuce and endive; the slimy Triton in the Piazza Barberina spatters himself with vanishing diamonds; a peasant leads an ass on which sits the mother with the babe in her arms, --a living flight into Egypt; in short, the beautiful spring day had awakened all of Rome that can awaken yet (for the ideal Rome waits for another morning), when we rattled along in our carrettella on the way to Palestrina. A carrettella is to the perfected vehicle as the coracle to the steamship; it is the first crude conception of a wheeled carriage. Doubtless the inventor of it was a prodigious genius in his day, and rode proudly in it, envied by the more fortunate pedestrian, and cushioned by his own inflated imagination. If the chariot of Achilles were like it, then was Hector happier at the tail than the son of Thetis on the box. It is an oblong basket upon two wheels, with a single seat rising in the middle. We had not jarred over a hundred yards of the Quattro Fontane, before we discovered that no elastic propugnaculum had been interposed between the body and the axle, so that we sat, as it were, on paving-stones, mitigated only by so much as wellseasoned ilex is less flinty-hearted than tufo or breccia. If there were any truth in the theory of developments, I am certain that we should have been furnished with a pair of rudimentary elliptical springs, at least, before half our day's journey was over. However, as one of those happy illustrations of ancient manners, which one meets wi...