Ariadne Author:Ouida Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and Crispin and Crispian and hear the merry Roman tongues wag round you all day long; for the epigrams of Pasquin and Marforio are but a few ripples out of many ... more »of the ever-running current of the Roman wit. And who is it that has said so wisely, " If you have nothing left in life, come to Rome" ? Here at least you shall learn your own littleness, and that of gods and men ; here in Rome, which has seen Zeus and Aidoneus pass away, and come to be words upon the mouths of men ; Rome, which has beheld Olympus fade like a dream of the night, and the glory depart from Ida; Rome, which killed the Nazarene, and set Borgia and Aldobrandini up in his likeness to reign over earth and heaven; Rome, which has seen nations perish leaving no sign, and deities die like moths, yet lives herself, and still conjures the world with the sorcery of an irresistible and imperishable name! CHAPTER, V. So I lived. "What they said of me at the bridge-corner was fair enough; only that silly soul, Serafina, thought too much of a trumpery pair of little red boots, only big enough for a grasshopper, and costing one nothing but a palm's-breadth of kid. But women are so : they have no medium ; either they drink the sea dry and are thankless, and if they got the stars down out of heaven would stamp them in the dust, or else they are like the poor taverner's wife, and give all their loyal souls' big gratitude for the broken crust of a careless gift. So I lived, I say, and had done nearly twenty years, in Rome. In the summers sometimes I went up among the little villages on the sides of the Sabine and Volscian Mountains, under the cork- and chestnut-woods, where the Women foot it merrily in front of the wine-shop, and the pipe and mandolin chirp all through the rosy evening. But I never wandered so far a...« less