Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which
would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman
dog. It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly
man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the
tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder
seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the
younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts
of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then
a cabman drove out of the mellay very excitedly, and then turned and
drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted
cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another's
backs and their heads peering carefully over one another's shoulders. On
the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one of those
strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples, with red-
braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those carabinieres--namely,
who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace.
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