Vagabond Adventures — CHAPTER V. The Conclusion

THE CONCLUSION.

I stayed at Florence all winter, living on the cheapest of food, indeed, but with the very best of company.

I haunted the galleries and studios so much that the artists took me for a devotee of art, and never asked me how I lived.

At dusk it was my custom to steal away toward my dinner, passing Michael Angelo’s David, forever about to throw the stone across the famous old Piazza, and gliding down a by-street till I came to the market.

There, in a little cook-shop, amid the filth and noise of the very raggedest of Florence, I partook of my macaroni, or, if I was fastidious, of my boiled beans and olive-oil, for seven centesimi,--one cent and two fifths of a cent; my bread made of chestnuts for two centesimi,--two fifths of a cent; and my half-glass of wine for seven centesimi,--my dinner, with a scrap of meat, averaging five cents, and rarely exceeding ten.

My glass of wine may be considered an extravagance.

It was not.

I could stand the bustle, the uncleanliness, and even the staring at a passably well-dressed person in such an unaccustomed place; but I could not stand the positive amazement expressed by young men and old women, old men and young women, beggars and organ artists, the day when I omitted wine.

It was too much for endurance.

Public opinion was against me.

I pretended to have forgotten to order my wine, and turned off the whole affair with a laugh.

Many and many a time I have seen a poor old creature, who was often my next neighbor at table, pay two centesimi for bread and seven centesimi for wine, and that was her whole meal.

This experience has always helped me to believe the account of that strange incident in the history of the Florentines, given, I think, by Macchiavelli, in which it is related that during the Republican days of Florence, when there was a hostile army making an inroad on their territories, the doughty republicans, having gone out to meet it, lay encamped some time not far from Lucca; and that, suddenly, when the enemy was almost upon them, they revolted, turned around, and marched home again, to let their territory and the fortunes of their city take care of themselves, because the Florentine army had unfortunately got out of wine!

Sometimes I spent my evenings at the _café_, where I always took my breakfast, and where for three soldi,--three cents,--invested in coffee or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers, or listening to the talk of my artist friends.

It was always cheaper for me to go to the opera--taking a very high seat, by the way--than to have a light and a fire in my room.

I have seen an opera with a hundred or more people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight cents.

* * * * * Thus I lived on in the city of art and olives.

When my money began to give out again, I thought I would condescend to transmit another article to the London magazine which had made my fortune before.

I transmitted another article; and at the time when I ought to have heard from it I was reduced to the sum of forty francs.

Receiving, at last, an envelope with the Paternoster mark upon it, I restrained my joy, and opened it leisurely, making merely the mental resolution that I would dine in state that day; for this was a longer article than the first one, and the sum which it would bring must be simply enormous.

Then I proceeded to read the following letter:-- “DEAR SIR,--Your article entitled ---- is respectfully declined”!

This time starvation was sure; but I had set my heart on seeing Rome.

I

thought there would be a sort of melancholy satisfaction in having visited the capital of the ancient world before going to any other new one.

I therefore took the next open-topped car for the sea-shore, having previously put my first rough draft of my unfortunate article into a new wrapper, and shipped it off to the editor of a less pretending periodical, published at Edinburgh.

I do not remember how or why, but the night after I left Florence I had to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money I had at a miserable, cheap _trattoria_, not far from the famous Leaning Tower.

I found a fierce-moustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and extraordinary conduct.

Two days afterward I took a fourth-class, that is, deck passage on the French steamer, sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn.

I stayed a week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer.

It was, indeed, by a miraculous chance that I ever left the Eternal City.

I had not money enough to pay the Pontifical tax on departing travellers.

It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers of the police, and, arriving at Leghorn again, I had not the ten cents to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer.

My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome; so that was out of danger, and came properly to hand afterward.

As my lucky star would have it, an American bark was lying at anchor in the bay.

It was the first time I had seen the “star-spangled banner” for two years, and I flew to it for protection.

I directed the boatman to take me to the American ship.

Standing in the bow of the smaller craft, as soon as she reached the greater one I sprang up the side, and the boatman sprang after me.

He detained half of my coat, but I reached the deck, where I kept him at bay with a belaying-pin till some one on the ship was roused; for it was early in the morning.

The ten cents were paid over to the clamorous Italian by a hearty tar, who was moved to see an American in distress, “with his mainsail carried away,”--I think that is the way the tar phrased it.

The captain of the ship was a warm-hearted old fellow from down in Maine.

He offered to take me home before I asked him.

I had a boyish love of independence, and proposed to work.

He said he wouldn’t be bothered with me; he would take me as his only passenger.

We settled the matter at last by my contracting grandly to owe him fifty dollars in “greenbacks.

” Our vessel was about twenty years old, and laden with rags and great blocks of marble.

We had a terrible storm in the Mediterranean, in which we came near going down.

The old craft seemed, however, to have some secret understanding with fate; for, having shifted her cargo, she floated, wellnigh on her beam-ends, the rest of that desolate ten weeks through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.

I arrived at Boston finally, without a cent.

I had directed that all letters should be forwarded from my address at Florence to the care of the merchant to whom our ship was consigned.

What was my surprise, then, to be handed by that gentleman an envelope enclosing a draft on London, in pay for the almost-forgotten article which I had sent in sheer desperation, if not in comprehensive revenge, to that Edinburgh magazine!

Greenbacks were then at their heaviest discount, and English exchange at its highest premium.

And thus it happened that I sold my draft for American money enough to pay the good-hearted captain and the patriotic tar, and to take me back to Toledo, my starting-place, after an absence of over two years, at the total expense of a little more than three hundred dollars.

* * * * * Here, at the proper end of my pilgrimage and of this book, while I am figuratively taking off my sandal shoon and hanging up my pilgrim staff, let me say that, although I did not set out with any higher purpose than to tell just such a story as I might tell under oath, still I think I discern in these European adventures what I may term an _ex post facto_ moral.

Let not the reader, however, practise and amuse his ingenuity by attempting to detect this in the earlier chapters of the present work, or by any manner of means in the pilgrim himself; for, personally, he feels as free from a moral as any pilgrim _he_ has ever seen has been free from superfluous linen.

While, therefore, I would not advise any young man to follow directly in my footsteps, yet I hope I have shown that there are means and modes of travel unknown to the guide-books; that there are cheap ways for the student and man of limited means to see and learn much for little money.

The sight of a sunrise from the Righi is certainly more than compensation for putting up with a poor breakfast.

And the candid traveller, however light his purse, needs never return dyspeptic or misanthropic.

Pure air and hearty exercise in the Alps and on the Danube cannot fail to do him physical good; while he will find in the human nature with which he comes in contact in every land the sum of the good invariably preponderating over that of the evil.

THE END.

Cambridge: Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company.

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