Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for
knowledge is satisfied. Somewhere he had come upon some question
touching a campanile or, possibly, _the_ Campanile, as it seemed to
him. Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books
have to say on the subject. He had in mind the Campanile at Venice,
not knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than
the one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile,
or bell-tower, also. When I told him that one of my friends saw the
Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday morning
back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party to
go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and
then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human
interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster. Nothing of this did I
mention to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental
machinery if only you get results.
Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to
feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these
cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much
of their history and geography in the schools.
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