Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 2.djvu/83

 most singular—neither Italian nor German in his ways, wild as an untamed animal—coarse and vulgar as a metropolitan vagrant. He was civil enough, indeed; but seemed half-mad with high spirits. You might have thought him half-drunk, but he was not—roaring and singing, and whipping his horses, and turning round to talk to the gentlemen in the caratella with a dare-devil air. I saw him whip his horses into a gallop, and heard him laughing and singing as he dashed down a road, which, in truth, required the drag. It was quite dusk—or rather, but for the stars, dark; which added not a little to the apparent danger. Our driver, a little more tame, yet disdained the drag—and we went down at a rattling pace: I was not sorry, for I was eager to assure myself that our friends in advance were not upset and rolled in the Adige, which rushed at the foot of the rock which our road bounded;—not they,—we reached the bottom, and saw the caratella dashing madly on in the advance. Before or since I never met such fellows; if my friends thought that Italians resembled them, they were indeed mistaken; they had none of their innate refinement, but they had their good humour: they were more like what one reads of as the wanderers of the far west—except, we are told, the Americans appear always to calculate,