Litchfield enquirer., 1874-06-04
From Scribner's Monthly. ADiNA.
IN TWO PARTS : PART I.

We nau been G3Ikln5 or oaIu OcrOpt
 round the fire mindful, such of us, O
 the rule de mortuis Or host, however,
 had said nothing; rather to my surprise
 as knew he had been particularly inti
 mate with our friend. Blu. when Oul
 group had dispersed, and I remained
 alone with him, he frightened the fire
 offered me another cigar, puffed his OWL
 awhile with retrospective air, and told
 me the following tale:
 Eighteen years ago Scrope and 1 were together ill Rome. It was the beginning
 of my acquaintance with him, and l had
 grown fond of him, as mild, meditative youth often does of an active, irreyerent
 caustic one. He had in those days the
 germs of the eccentricities,-not to call
 them by hard name,-which made him afterwards the most intolerable of the friends we did not absolutely break with:
 he was already, as they say, a crooked stick. He was cynical, perverse, conceit- was young, and youth, happily, makes many of our vices innocent. Scrope had his merits, or our friendship would not have ripened. He was not an amiable man
 but he was an honest one-in spite of the odd caprice have to relate; and half my kindness for him was based in a feeling that at bottom, in spite of his vanity, he enjoyed his own irritability as little as other people. It was his fancy to pretend that he enjoyed nothing, and that what sentimental travellers call picturesqueness
 was weariness to his spirit: but the world was new to him and the charm of fine things often took him by surprise and stole march on his premature cyn1- cism- He was an observer in spite of him. self, and III his happy moods, thanks to his capital memory and ample informa- ton, an excellent critic and most profita- ble companion. He was a punctilious classical scholar. My boylsh journal kept in those days, is stuffed with learned all to the service of my Roman experience much more loose sentiment than rigid sci ence. It was indeed a jocular bargain between us that in our wanderings, pie turesque and archaeological, should un- raptures, the reflections, the sketching, me absurdly Byronic, and when in the manner of tourists at that period, I breath ed poetic sighs over the subjection of It. ally to the foreign foe, he used to swear that Italy had got no more than she de- served, that she was land of vagabonds and declaimers, and that he had yet to see an Italian whom he could call a man. l quoted to him from Alferi that the'shu- man plant" grew stronger in Italy than anywhere else, and he retorted. that noth- ing grew strong there but lying and cheating, laziness, beggarY and vermin. Of course we each said more than we be- Heved. If we met shepherd on the Campagna, leaning on his crook and gaz- ing at us darkly from under the shadow of his matted locks, l would proclaim that he was the handsomest fellow in the world, and demand of Scrope to stop and let me sketch him. Scrope would con- found him for filthy scare-crow and me in the street to stare ap at some mouldering p0tGzzQ with q patcnc5- Psa4i- coat hung to dry from the drawing-room and assured him that it's haunt ed disrepair was dearer to my soul than the neat barred front of my Aunt Esther's model mansion in Mount Vernon street, he would seize me by the arm and march me of; pinching me till l shook myself free, and whelming me, my soul and my paiazzO, ill a ludicrous torrent of abuse. The truth is that the picturesque of Ita ly, both in man and nature, fretted him, depressed him strangely. He was con- sciously harsh note in the midst of so many mellow harmonies every thing seemed to say to him-"Dont you wish you were as easy, as loveable, as careless ly beautiful as we?" In the bottom of his heart he did wish it. To appreciate the bitterness of this dumb disrelish of the Italian atmosphere, you must remem- Der how very ugly the poor fellow was. He was uglier at twenty than at forty, for as he grew older 1t became the fashion to say that his crooked features were ''dls- tinguished.' But twenty years ago, in the infancy of modern aesthetics, he could not have passed for even a bizarre form of ornament. In 0 single word, poor Scrope looked common: that was where the shoe pinched. Now you know that in Italy rlmost everything, has, to the outer sense, what artists call style.
 In spite of our clashing theories, our friendship did ripen, and we spent togeth- CT many hours, deeply seasoned with the sense of youth and freedom The best of these, perhaps, were those we passed on horseback, on the Campa9na; you re- member such hours; you remember those days of early winter, when the sun is as strong as that of a New England June, and the bare, purple-drawn slopes and hollows lie bathed in the yellow light of Italy. On such a day, Scrope and I before St. John Lateran, and rode away across the broad meadows over which the Claudian Aqueduct drags it's slow length
 
 as it goes, beneath the burden of the cen turies. We rode a long distance-well towards Albano, and at last stopped near be all that was left of an ancient tower. Was 1t indeed ancient, or was 1t relic of one of the mediavial fortresses, with which the grassy desert of the Campagna is studded? This was one of the questions which Scrope, as a competent classicist, liked to ponder; though when called his attention to the picturesque effect of the fringe of wild plants which crowned the ruin, and detached their clear flaments in the deep blue air, he shrugged his shoulders; and said they only helped the patchwork to crumble. We tethered our horses to n wild fig tree hard by, and strolled'around the tower. Suddenly on tuo Suu1J SLUG O1 1t, We Cdulc upOu uS- ure asleep on the grass. A young man lay there, all unconscious, with his head upon pile of weed-smothered stones. A rusty gun was on the ground beside him, and an empty game-bag, lying near it, told of his being an unlucky sportsman. His heavy sleep seemed to point to long
 mornings fruitless tramp. And yet he
 must have been either very unskilled, or very little in earnest, for the Campagna is alive with small game every month in the year-or was, at least, twenty years ago. It was no more than owed to my reputation for Byronism, to discover a careless, youthful grace in the young fellows attitude. One of his legs was flung over the other; one of his arms was
 thrust back under his head, and the oth-
 CT resting loosly on the grass; his Lead
 drouped backward, and exposed a strong,
 young throat; his hat was pulled over his
 eyes, so that we could see nothing but
 lis mouth and chin. .sAn American rus
 tic asleep is an ugly fellow" said I; ssbut
 this young Roman clod- hopper, as he lies
 snoring there, is really statuesque; stclod- hooper," was for ar0nment for onr rus-