the town, you will hear this game in progress in a score of wineshops
at once; and looking over any vineyard walk, or turning
almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in full cry.
It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out some
particular number oftener than another; and the vigilance with
which two sharp-eyed players will mutually endeavour to detect this
weakness, and adapt their game to it, is very curious and
entertaining. The effect is greatly heightened by the universal
suddenness and vehemence of gesture; two men playing for half a
Page 23
Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
farthing with an intensity as all-absorbing as if the stake were
life.
Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member
of the Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits
for their summer quarters. I walked into its dismantled precincts
the other evening about sunset, and couldn’t help pacing up and
down for a little time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place:
which is repeated hereabouts in all directions.
I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a
weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third
side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the
neighbouring hills, the fourth. I don’t believe there was an
uncracked stone in the whole pavement. In the centre was a
melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly
as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and afterwards
powdered. The stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all
ruinous, all utterly deserted.
Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying
about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the outbuildings,
that I couldn’t help thinking of the fairy tales, and
eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be
changed back again. One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute,
with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined
to think): came prowling round and round me, as if he half
believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry
the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he
suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous
tail, that he couldn’t get into the little hole where he lived, but
was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had
gone down together.
In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut;
but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and
THAT was shut up too. The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering
barrack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was
wide open at the door: and I have no doubt I might have gone in,
and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only
one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of
these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura
lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in
stone basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling,
under grown or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of
slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable life. There was
nothing bright in the whole scene but a firefly – one solitary
firefly – showing against the dark bushes like the last little
speck of the departed Glory of the house; and even it went flitting
up and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and
describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking for the
rest of the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had
become of it.
In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my