Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/11

Rh eyes glanced from beneath them. The streets and promenades were thronged with people. It all looked festal.

I fetched away from Madame B.'s my young country woman, Jenny Lind, who is not however our great artist, Jenny Lind, with the glorious voice, but a good girl, true, handsome, and blooming as a Hebe, as are many Swedish girls. We obtained two most charming little rooms, with mosaic floors, and the most lovely view over the harbor and the great ocean, in the Hotel de Ville, up four flights of steps. It was rather high, but the steps are of white marble, and convenient. The hotel was a Palazzo Grimaldi, and one is willing to ascend somewhat aloft to have such air and such a view. Jenny, I, and one of the young Norwegians, who accompanied me hither, spent the evening comfortably with a tea-supper, conversing before the open glass-doors of the balcony, and with a view over the sea and the vast horizon, which was lit up every minute with grand lightning flashes without thunder. The air was refreshing and pleasant.

After a week in Genoa.—One might live here a long time, and continually have new pleasure. The popular life is peculiar and full of animation. The women's vails, or gauze pezottos, as they are called, give a remarkably picturesque character to their heads, although these in general lack beauty; but the pezotto which flutters round the figure, gives a grace and embellishment to it. The pezotto indeed has no other purpose than this, because it does not cover, it does not even cast a shadow over the countenance,