"I suppose you don't always understand what those fellows say," I
suggested from my seat beside him.
"No, sir," he confessed. "But I give it to 'em back in English," he
added, joyously.
He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp,
broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that
there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an
opinion of the government's motives in the matter with respect to
motors, as if he thought them bad.
The scenery of the Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a
battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its
masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the
mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow. But as
we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no
longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of
the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all others, is the
friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple,
which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like
each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around
Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the
world.
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