The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peasants in an ox-cart.  These the conductor tried to engage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service.  The simple incident enforced the fact already known to us,—­that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.

Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster.  As the conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry.  We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us:  a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist.  Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,—­copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.

We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto.  Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public conveyance in Italy—­and everywhere else—­always stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.

We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages.  The drying of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety.  At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and, returning