Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/351

Rh of the luggage followed of course, with time for a cup of coffee and some biscuits which were very much needed! At 10 I was in Verona.

"Am I in Italy?" asked poet Rogers to himself in rapture when he came to this classic land, and the same question seemed to arise in my mind as I walked through the streets of Verona on the sunny morning of the 29th November. There could be no doubt however in the matter. Everything around me told me that I had left the last traces of gloomy Gothic architecture behind and had come to a land where the very houses spoke of tropical taste and tropical imagination. As I walked through the narrow but cleanly streets with the well plastered houses and green venetian windows, I could well fancy myself in some Indian city,—in some quiet handsome streets in Calcutta! From the doorways I could see square courtyards inside the large houses, not unlike our Indian courtyards, and as portly Italian gentlemen passed lazily by me with the right wing of their loose cloaks flung over their left shoulders, so as to cover their chin and even their mouth and nose,—I thought to myself I had seen their not very distant relations of a winter morning in the streets of Calcutta! Inside the numerous churches I saw women kneeling before images of Saints or of the Virgin which would have passed as Lakshmi or Kartikeya if robed in Indian drapery.

But the resemblance, which is not altogether fanciful, goes farther and deeper. The same genial climate and