Thus we had passed, I hardly know how, half through the part of Italy that they call Lombardy, when on a fine evening we stopped at a country inn.  The post-horses were to be ready for us at the neighboring station in a couple of hours, so the painters left the carriage, and were shown into a special apartment, to rest a little, and to write some letters.  I was greatly pleased, and betook myself to the common room to eat and drink in comfort.  Here everything looked rather disreputable:  the maids were going about with their hair in disorder and their neckerchiefs awry, exposing their sallow skin; the men-servants were at their supper in blue smock-frocks, around a circular table, whence they glowered at me from time to time.  They all wore their hair tied behind in a short, thick queue which looked quite dandified.  “Here you are,” I said to myself, as I ate my supper, “here you are in the country from which such queer people used to come to the Herr Pastor’s with mouse-traps, and barometers, and pictures.  How much a man learns who makes up his mind not to stick close to his own hearth-stone all his life!”

As I was thus eating my supper and meditating, a little man, who had been sitting in a dim corner of the room over a glass of wine, darted out of his nook at me like a spider.  He was quite short and crooked, and he had a big ugly head, with a long hooked nose and sparse red whiskers, while his powdered hair stood on end all over his head as if a hurricane had swept over it.  He wore an old-fashioned, threadbare dress-coat, short, plush breeches, and faded silk stockings.  He had once been in Germany, and prided himself upon his knowledge of German.  He sat down by me and asked a hundred questions, perpetually taking snuff the while—­Was I the servitore?  When did we arrive?  Had we gone to Roma?  All this I myself did not know, and really I could not understand his gibberish. “Parlez-vous francais?” I asked him at last in my distress.  He shook his big head, and I was very glad, for neither did I speak French.  But it was of no use, he had taken me in hand, and went on asking question after question; the more we parleyed the less we understood each other, until at last we both grew angry, and I actually thought the Signor would have liked to peck me with his hooked beak, until the maids, who had been listening to our confusion of tongues, laughed heartily at us.  I put down my knife and fork and went out of doors; for in this strange land I, with my German tongue, seemed to have sunk down fathoms deep into the sea, where all sorts of unfamiliar, crawling creatures were gliding about me, peopling the solitude and glaring and snapping at me.

Outside, the summer night was warm and inviting.  From the distant vineyards a laborer’s song now and then fell on the ear; there was lightning low on the horizon, and the landscape seemed to tremble and whisper in the moonlight.  Sometimes I thought I perceived a tall, dim figure gliding behind the hazel hedge in front of the house and peeping through the twigs, and then all would be motionless.  Suddenly Herr Guido appeared on the balcony above me.  He did not see me, and began to play with great skill on a zither which he must have found in the house, singing to it like a nightingale: