"
He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling
acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has
baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the
baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow,
disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me
there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time
some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he
grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have
had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was
taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is
always that chance.
If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo
Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now
with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their
light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the
cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit
reserves and misgivings.
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