on his devoted head. He swore in French, prayed in Italian, and
went up and down, beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy
of despair. There were various carters and mule-drivers assembled
round the broken waggon, and at last some man of an original turn
of mind, proposed that a general and joint effort should be made to
get things to-rights again, and clear the way--an idea which I
verily believe would never have presented itself to our friend,
though we had remained there until now. It was done at no great
cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were
wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten
his misery. The moment he was on his box once more, and clattering
briskly down hill, he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant
girls, as if it were not in the power of misfortune to depress him.

Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this
beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them
are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the
inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with
their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head,
like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the
Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim
doorways with their spindles, or crooning together in by-corners,
they are like a population of Witches--except that they certainly
are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument of
cleanliness. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold
wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means
ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs,
with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their
own tails.