One has had the same thought a hundred times in the same circumstances, but it is worth dwelling upon.

Among these representative men, young and old, of Catanzaro, the tone of conversation was incomparably better than that which would rule in a cluster of English provincials met to enjoy their evening leisure.

They did, in fact, converse--a word rarely applicable to English talk under such conditions; mere personal gossip was the exception; they exchanged genuine thoughts, reasoned lucidly on the surface of abstract subjects.

I say on the surface; no remark that I heard could be called original or striking; but the choice of topics and the mode of viewing them was distinctly intellectual.

Phrases often occurred such as have no equivalent on the lips of everyday people in our own country.