Tony, agape,
shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that, spite of
the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was no
undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play, as in such
crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious suavity which
seemed to include everybody in the circumference of one huge joke.
In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore off, and Tony was
beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when a lift of the tide
bore him against a droll-looking bell-ringing fellow who carried
above his head a tall metal tree hung with sherbet-glasses.
The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off
and clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the
saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a
ducat by mistake for a sequin. The fellow's eyes shot out of their
orbits, and just then a personable-looking young man who had
observed the transaction stepped up to Tony and said pleasantly, in
English:
"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."
"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other
laughed and replied: "You have given him enough to retire from his
business and open a gaming-house over the arcade."
Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the
preliminaries, the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a
glass of Canary in front of one of the coffee-houses about the
square. Tony counted himself lucky to have run across an
English-speaking companion who was good-natured enough to give him a
clue to the labyrinth; and when he had paid for the Canary (in the
coin his friend selected) they set out again to view the town.
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