Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois,
but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than
his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you
in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and
two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was
trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly
kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is
really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three
o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the
alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the
stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.
I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by
pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into
regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really
noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow
less and the olive-trees scraggier.
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