We then
went on again, through a region gradually becoming bleaker and
wilder, until it became as bare and desolate as any Scottish moors.
Soon after dark, we halted for the night, at the osteria of La
Scala: a perfectly lone house, where the family were sitting round
a great fire in the kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or
four feet high, and big enough for the roasting of an ox. On the
upper, and only other floor of this hotel, there was a great, wild,
rambling sala, with one very little window in a by-corner, and four
black doors opening into four black bedrooms in various directions.
To say nothing of another large black door, opening into another
large black sala, with the staircase coming abruptly through a kind
of trap-door in the floor, and the rafters of the roof looming
above: a suspicious little press skulking in one obscure corner:
and all the knives in the house lying about in various directions.
The fireplace was of the purest Italian architecture, so that it
was perfectly impossible to see it for the smoke. The waitress was
like a dramatic brigand's wife, and wore the same style of dress
upon her head.
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