places he would like to be buried and what parts of the earth he would like to be a part of. The stinking, putrefying part doesn’t last very long, really, he thought, and anyway you are just a sort of mulch, and even the bones will be some use finally. I’d like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees. I don’t think it would be much of a nuisance to them. I could be a part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jumping horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of fly.
They were up on the causeway from Mestre to Venice now with the ugly Breda works that might have been Hammond, Indiana.
“What do they make there, sir?” Jackson asked.
“The company makes locomotives in Milan,” the Colonel said. “Here they make a little of everything in the metallurgic line.”
It was a miserable view of Venice now and he always disliked this causeway except that you made such good time and you could see the buoys and the channels.
“This town makes a living on its own,” he said to Jackson. “She used to be the queen of the seas and the people are very tough and they give less of a good Goddamn about things than almost anybody you’ll ever meet. It’s a tougher town than Cheyenne when you really know it, and everybody is very polite.”
“I wouldn’t say Cheyenne was a tough town, sir.”
