We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. He had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship. The humbled mutineer smelt it, tasted it, and returned to his seat. “It is inferior-for coffee-but it is pretty fair tea.' He smelt it-tasted it-smiled benignantly-then said: “Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan.” He flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said: The incipient mutineer was more outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown the captain’s table over the other tables in the ship. He went back and complained in a high-handed way to Capt. As he approached the table one morning he saw the transparent edge-by means of his extraordinary vision long before he got to his seat.

He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around the edge of the cup. The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water-so this person said. “I am reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a passenger. 'Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?” I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.

She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it.

The innocents abroad sparknotes