266 PRĘTERITA-II

there was a pause at the brink of one of the streams, in rather angry flood, and some question if the carriage could get through. Loaded, it could not, and everybody was ordered to get out and be carried across, the carriage to follow, in such shifts as it might. Everybody obeyed these orders, and submitted to the national customs with great hilarity, except my mother, who absolutely refused to be carried in the arms of an Italian ragged opera hero, more or less resembling the figures whom she had seen carrying off into the mountains the terrified Taglioni, or Cerito.¹ Out of the carriage she would not move, on any solicitation;- if they could pull the carriage through, they could pull her too, she said. My father was alike alarmed and angry, but as the surrounding opera corps de ballet seemed to look on the whole thing rather as a jest, and an occasion for bajocco gathering, than any crisis of fate, my mother had her way; a good team of bare-legged youngsters was put to, and she and the carriage entered the stream with shouting. Two-thirds through, the sand was soft, and horses and boys stopped to breathe. There was another, and really now serious, remonstrance with my mother, we being all nervous about quicksands, as if it had been the middle of Lancaster Bay. But stir she would not; the horses got their wind again, and the boys their way, and with much whip cracking and splashing, carriage and dama Inglese were victoriously dragged to dry land, with general promotion of goodwill between the two nations.

26. Of the passage of Magra, a day or two afterwards, my memory is vague as its own waves. There were all sorts of paths across the tract of troubled shingle, and I was thinking of the Carrara mountains beyond, all the while. Most of the streams fordable easily enough; a plank or two, loosely propped with a heap of stones, for pier and buttress, replaced after every storm, served the foot passenger. The main stream could neither be bridged

¹ [For Taglioni, see above, p. 176. Francesca Cerito (born at Naples, 1821) was another ballet-dancer of the time; a pas de quatre in which she joined with Fanny Elssler, Taglioni, and Carlotta Grisi used to be famous.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]