Drawing nigh, I observed that he wore a very high hat and a very short
sack coat; that his waistcoat was of a combustible plaid pattern with
gaiters to match; that he had taken his fingers many times to the
jeweler, but not once to the manicure; that he was beautifully jingled
and alcoholically boastful of his native land and that--a crowning
touch--he wore flaring from an upper pocket of his coat a silk
handkerchief woven in the design and colors of his country's flag. But,
praises be, it was not our flag that he wore thus. It was the Union
Jack. As we passed out into the damp Viennese midnight he was loudly
proclaiming that he "Was'h Bri'sh subjesch," and that unless something
was done mighty quick, would complain to "Is Majeshy's rep(hic)shenativ'
ver' firsch thing 'n morn'."
So though I was sorry he was a cousin, I was selfishly and unfeignedly
glad that he was not a brother. Since in the mysterious and unfathomable
scheme of creation it seemed necessary that he should be born somewhere,
still he had not been born in America, and that thought was very
pleasing to me.
There was another variety of the tourist breed whose trail I most
earnestly desired to cross. I refer to the creature who must be closely
watched to prevent him, or her, from carrying off valuable relics as
souvenirs, and defacing monuments and statues and disfiguring holy
places with an inconsequential signature. In the flesh--and such a
person must be all flesh and no soul--I never caught up with him, but
more than once I came upon his fresh spoor.
In Venice our guide took us to see the nether prisons of the Palace of
the Doges. From the level of the Bridge of Sighs we tramped down flights
of stone stairs, one flight after another, until we had passed the hole
through which the bodies of state prisoners, secretly killed at night,
were shoved out into waiting gondolas and had passed also the room where
pincers and thumbscrew once did their hideous work, until we came to a
cellar of innermost, deepermost cells, fashioned out of the solid rock
and stretching along a corridor that was almost as dark as the cells
themselves. Here, so we were told, countless wretched beings, awaiting
the tardy pleasure of the torturer or the headsman, had moldered in damp
and filth and pitchy blackness, knowing day from night only by the fact
that once in twenty-four hours food would be slipped through a hole in
the wall by unseen hands; lying here until oftentimes death or the cruel
mercy of madness came upon them before the overworked executioner found
time to rack their limbs or lop off their heads.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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