Losing yourself--and with yourself your sense of the reality of
things--you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses
with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids
like hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers
and coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of
song; and on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one
another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences, is a
strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there
is a rich, nutritious garlicky smell too; and against a jog in
the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag-picker is asleep on a pile
of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not
guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have moved since I
was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both
of being permanent fixtures.
You pass a little church, lolling and lopped with the weight of
the years; and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars
and soft half-lights, and twinkling candles set upon the high
altar. Not even the jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress
up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely
dispel its abiding, brooding air of peace and majesty. You linger
a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of
parts might have frequented the while he penned his versified
inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily
answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows
that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.
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