a strange figure mending a net.

“You see that old woman sewing? She is a deaf-mute, and she believes
that she is a man. If it were true it would be miraculous, _perché ha
fatto una figlia_ (because she has “made” a daughter). She avoids all
women, spends all her time with the fishermen. As she cannot talk and
mends their nets for them--they do not object.”

Teodora laid down the long black cigar she was smoking and took off her
hat to us. Save for a short dark skirt she was dressed like a man.

“It is against the law for a woman to wear pantaloons,” Ercole
explained.

“But not for asses or men?”

Ercole laughed immoderately--part of his pleasant flattery.

We made the ascent of Mt. Epomeo; after completing the course of eleven
baths, we wished to put to the test what they had done for me. We drove
to Fontana, taking our luncheon with us--why do things taste best out of
a basket? We left Ercole and the piebald at the inn and climbed to the
summit of the extinct volcano where there is a curious hermitage
dedicated to St. Nicola cut out of the volcanic tufa rock. The view from
here is not so fine as it is half way up the mountain. It is rather too
much like looking down upon a dissected map, but it does give one a
wonderful geographical sensation, fixes the relations between the
Sorrentine peninsula, Vesuvius, the islands of the Sirens, Capri, the
promontory of Circeo (where Circe lived), Procida the golden, and the
other points of this earthly paradise, between Terracina on the north
and the Punta di Campanella on the south. We were helped to orient
ourselves by Lucia, a “lady guide,” who joined us half way up the
mountain. She is a handsome old woman with wild white hair, bright blue
eyes, and a shrewd peasant face. She hailed me at sight as an American.

“How do you know that I am not English?” I asked.

“I can always recognize the _Americani, Signora mia_.”

“By what sign do you know us?” I asked.

“By the expression of the countenance.”

When I first came to Italy I should have scoffed at this; now I have
lived away from home so long that I too recognize the American
expression,--nervous, sensitive, masterful,--the Look Dominant!

“_Si vede Procida, La Spagna, io veggio a te!_” Lucia crooned a stave of
the old Neapolitan song, Funiculi Funicula, in a cracked voice.

“Yes, yes, I know both _Americani ed Inglesi_; my daughter’s husband is
an _Inglese_.”

“Where did she meet him?”

“Here on Mt. Epomeo, where else? _Una bella ragazza_ (She was a pretty
girl)! You may not believe it, Signori, but there is no difference
between my daughter and me save a matter of fifteen years. At fifty she
is just what I was,--at sixteen she was her mother over again. You would
not think it, eh? Well, one can speak about it, now that one is so old.
She was called the most beautiful girl in all Ischia. How do I know if
it was true? I could not think so, you see, because she was myself over
again, and I never saw any difference between myself and the other
girls.”

“I hope your daughter has a good husband.”

“_Grazie a Dio_, a good husband, yes, yes, a good husband.”

“Who was that pretty girl at the inn down at Fontana?” J. asked.

“_Bella? quella ragazza? faccia di patate_ (Pretty? that girl? a potato
face)! Ai! if you could have seen my Eva! The Madonna herself was not
more beautiful. That girl, the innkeeper’s daughter, is as awkward as a
cow, and she squints besides, as her mother did before her.”

“_No, no_,” J. protested; “_è un bel pezzo di donna_ (she is a fine
piece of a woman).”

Lucia gave him a keen look. “The signore should not laugh at the poor
girl. _Il buon Dio_ does not give a handsome face to every woman.”

“Fortunately, for the peace of the world, that is true.”

“But the signore is an artist? one sees that from his manner of looking
at things. Well, if the innkeeper’s Anna is a pretty girl, call me a
_bruttona_ (big ugly thing). If my daughter had not been out of the
common, do you think a rich gentleman would have married her? Yes, yes,
I am telling you the truth. She does no work, they live in a palazzo, my
daughter has servants to wait on her, do you believe it? she does not
even comb her own hair! And she has jewels, such diamonds! For every
child she gives him, he gives her a great pearl, each bigger than the
last.”

“How many children have they?”

“_Ha fatto quattro maschi e tre femmine_ (She has borne four males and
three females), all straight and well formed. The youngest is Lucia, for
the poor old _nonna_ (grandmother) at Ischia.”

“Where do they live?”

She pointed across the sea. “What do I know of foreign countries? I am
of the island. Here I was born, here I shall die.”

“You must be very proud of your grandchildren.” This is always a safe
remark.

“_Ha ragione, eccellenza, guardi_ (You are right, excellency, observe),
I am only a poor _ignorante_, but I made the great _matrimonio_ for my
daughter. Eva was always here with me, upon the flanks of Epomeo,
guiding the foreigners, but for me she would be here still, as my mother
and her mother before her were here. In those days before the
_terremoto_ many strangers came to Epomeo. From the first moment the
young _Inglese_ saw the girl he was _innamorato_. He came every day, he
pretended to sketch the mountain. I knew he was no artist; why, any one
could see he was _un gran signore_ by the way he spent his money. One
day he asked leave to paint my daughter. I said, ’_Scuse, Signore_, you
are a rich gentleman, I am only a beggar, _ma io sono padrona della mia
figlivola_ (I am the mistress of my little daughter). The day Eva takes
a husband he will be _padrone_; till that time, _scusi, Signore, ma sono
padrona io_!’ Would you believe it? a week from that day Eva and the
_Inglese_ were married by the priest who married her father and mother
and who gave her the holy rite of baptism.”

Sing me a song of the wisdom of old women!

I was bent upon exploring the hermitage, in spite of Lucia. The hermit
has departed the way of hermits and others. In his stead reigns Orlando,
a cross old man, between whom and Lucia there is war to the knife.

“Their excellencies are not going down without seeing the hermitage?” he
whined.

“Certainly not,” J. assured him.

“Do not go in; it is a dirty hole, and there is nothing to see,”
whispered Lucia, catching me by the sleeve.

“That silly old woman is tiring out the lady,” said Orlando to J.;
“drive her away, she is a pest.” As I put my foot on the lowest step of
the rough-hewn rock stairway leading to the hermitage, Lucia fell back
and said no more. I was evidently out of her domain and in the enemy’s
territory. As she had said, there was little to see in the two rooms cut
out of the living rock. Orlando’s bed, a pile of straw, occupied the
outer room, the inner cell served as his kitchen and larder. He offered
bread and wine; we were firm in refusing refreshment; his feelings were
soothed by a _mancia_, and by telling him we should come again and take
his photograph (our kodak had been forgotten).

“The next time their excellencies come they must not let that old
_chiacchierone_ (gossip) hang on to them. She pesters the travellers so
with her talk that she frightens them away. Truly you will find it set
down in the red book of the strangers (Baedeker) that a guide is
unnecessary, though a few _soldi_ are due to the person living in the
hermitage, who is ready and able to explain intelligently the view and
the locality.”

At the foot of the steps Lucia again took us in charge, after an
exchange of malevolent glances with Orlando.

“_Stregona_ (Big old witch),” Orlando muttered.

“_Birbacaione_ (Big rogue),” mumbled Lucia.

She came down with us as far as the cab.

“_Addio, eccellenza, e mille grazie._”

“_Addio_, Lucia, and thanks to you.” At the turn of the road we looked
back and saw the strong, bent little woman leaning against the wall,
waiting to guide the next _forestieri_ who might turn up.

“Is it true what Lucia tells us about her daughter?” I asked Ercole.

“Who knows? these old women gossip to amuse strangers. There is a new
story for every day in the week. We must not believe everything that we
hear.”

Was Ercole jealous, too?

The next time I saw Olivetta she began to chatter about Lucia.

“She told you about her daughter? Yes? It is quite true. The girl
caught the fancy of a rich milord, and he married her. One thing I am
sure Lucia did not tell you. Her son-in-law has bought her a nice
cottage, the best house in Fontana, he gives her a handsome income;
truly, Lucia is rich, but she is avaricious. I ask you, does she not
look like a beggar? That is all a comedy; she has good clothes and
shoes. Truly, I should not be surprised if, when she dies, we should
find that Lucia is the richest woman in Ischia; it is a shame that she
should ask money from the strangers.”

“Perhaps it is not the money so much as the occupation Lucia likes,” I
suggested.

“_Ma ché_, she is robbing others who would gladly take her place. There
is the excellent Orlando, he is my relation. Poor man, he is lame and
cannot work. As long as Lucia remains there is no chance for another
guide; _è fina quella donna_ (she is a sharp one, that woman). Ask the
_colonello_,--he can tell you all about Lucia and her daughter.”

The _colonello_, protector of the poor and purveyor of pantaloons to
suffering donkeys, is at this hotel. He is a delightful, warm-blooded
creature, who cannot be quite comfortable unless everybody else in
sight--even an ass--is comfortable too. Like the others, he had a great
deal to say about Lucia; of all the personages we have met--the place is
full of personages--she seems to have the most marked character.

“Gad, sir, the old woman is right,” said the colonel. “The day she goes
out of the guide business she will go to pieces. Why should she give up
her job because her daughter has married into another sphere? I’m d--d
if I don’t like her spirit!”

“What is the daughter like?” I asked.

“She is a good sort,” said the colonel. “When her husband took her to
his mother’s house, what do you suppose they did with her? sent her to
school, had her taught like a child. She learned many things, how to
talk small talk, how to behave at table, how to dress and all the rest
of it. When they thought she had learned enough she came home to her
husband. He gave a great dinner to introduce her to his family--oh, they
all acted sensibly. The bride behaved very nicely and quietly, they all
liked her for her pretty manners (you know the people hereabouts have
excellent manners, better than half the aristocracy at home, I tell
them) as well as for her remarkable beauty; she must have been worth
seeing in those days. After the dinner was over and the guests had left
the dining-room, the husband coming back for something found his wife
going round the table collecting the ends of the cigars the men had left
on their plates.

“‘What on earth do you want with those nasty things?’ he asked.

“‘I shall send them to my poor old father at Ischia!’

“She had been in the habit of picking up the ends of the travellers’
cigars for the old man. Do you wonder that she has made a good wife and
mother? I tell you she has a good heart; if a woman has that, what else
matters?”

When we made our second trip to Epomeo to keep faith with Orlando, Lucia
was nowhere visible; we made the ascent without her. Orlando held
undisputed possession of Epomeo.

“Where is your friend Lucia?” we asked.

He fairly spluttered, “_Una vecchiarella stupida senza educazione_ (A
stupid old woman without education)! Do you know what I believe? I
believe that her daughter and son-in-law are in Ischia. When they are on
the island, Lucia sits all day at her window dressed in her Sunday
clothes. To see her you would never fancy that she was the guide to Mt.
Epomeo--not that there is any need of a guide, as you yourselves
perceive.”

On our way through Fontana we passed a neat cottage, caught a whiff of
fragrance of oleanders in the garden, a glimpse of an old woman sitting
bolt upright in an armchair, a flash from her sharp blue eyes. It was
Lucia, our little old guide, her wild hair neatly coifed by a peasant
cap; she sat up as if she were sitting for her photograph, stiff,
uncomfortable, wretched in her finery.

That night at the hotel an interesting couple who had arrived since the
morning sat opposite to us at dinner; a tall, silent man who looked as
if he might have been in the army, and a grave, handsome woman of fifty.
She has a certain noble amplitude of brow, a width between the eyes, a
calm quality of face and figure, very restful in contrast to certain
giddy young ladies of her age who enliven the table d’hote. She speaks
English with a slight accent. We made acquaintance over the mustard,
which we both prefer _à l’Anglaise_. The gentleman spoke of Ischia and
the neighboring parts of the country with such familiarity that I asked
him about my enchanted island, Procida.

“It is such an ideal looking place that it ought only to be inhabited by
beautiful rose-colored maidens,” I said.

He looked at his wife as he answered me.

“Ischia is the island for handsome women,” he said. “Procida is best
seen as you have seen it, from a distance. It is the place where the
Italian convicts are sent.”

Was not that a sad pricking of a rainbow bubble? His next words atoned
for that shattered illusion; they were addressed to his wife.

“Eva, my dear,” he said, “let me give you a little of this _vino di
paese_ (wine of the country). It comes from the _vigna_ on Mt. Epomeo,
it is the kind you used to like when you were a girl.”

At the name Eva I looked at the _colonello_, who was devouring green
figs at the end of the table. He answered my questioning look by one of
acquiesence.

Orlando was right! Lucia’s daughter and the husband of Lucia’s daughter
had come to Ischia to see Lucia!

“May I trouble you to hand me that other plate of figs?” said the
_colonello_. “The figs of Ischia are the finest in the world. I
sometimes wonder how many figs a man may eat and live.”

Suddenly light dawned! The _colonello_ is undoubtedly the “Old Person of
Ischia.” On the flanks of Epomeo we had looked for him, in the
sun-pierced alleys of Ischian vineyards, among the sailors on the
Marina, even in the halls of the _stabilimento_--our quest, the magnet
that drew us out of the path of duty (_that_ led back to Rome and the
studio), the hero of Lear’s verse. He was here, sleeping under the same
roof with us, sitting at the same table! Have not we ourselves seen him
eat scores, possibly hundreds of figs? If we could postpone our return
to Rome we should doubtless get up into the thousands, for,--

    “There was an old person of Ischia,
     Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier.
       He danced hornpipes and jigs,
       And ate thousands of figs,
     This lively old person of Ischia.”

XI

OLD AND NEW ROME--PALESTRINA

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, 1899.

Sunday afternoon we went over to hear vespers at St. Peter’s (the music
was Palestrina’s). The service was celebrated in the gorgeous Cappella
del Coro. It must have been some especial _festa_, for the chapel was
even more magnificent than usual, the priests wore extra fine flowered
brocade robes, the air was bluer and heavier with incense, there were
more candles. The slumbrous canons, in purple gowns and gray
squirrel-skin capes, dozed in their fretted stalls. Over their heads, in
the carved and gilded gallery, stood the choristers, two by two, each
pair holding between them a quaint, black-lettered music book; behind
the choir was the organ, in front, the leader, baton in hand. They all
wore white lace-trimmed cottas over black gowns. Their voices, dominated
by the piercing sweetness of the Pope’s angel, a male soprano, filled
the chapel with an almost overpowering melody, that flowed through the
gilded gates and floated out into the distant aisles and transepts of
the great church.

Wandering about after service, we came upon the tomb of Palestrina, in
the transept near the chapel where his _magnificat_ had rung out so
gloriously.

“The Church has a long memory for its saints, sinners, and
master-workmen. If I thought it would remember me, now, I would take the
vows to-morrow,” somebody said in my ear. It was Patsy.

“Jolly to think,” he went on, “of the old boy who led that choir and
composed that music for ’em--he died, you know, in 1594,--lying here
within the smell of the incense, within the sound of his own harmonics.”
Patsy’s only instrument is the guitar.

“I like incense,” he went on; “the Roman populace smells no sweeter than
in the days Shakespeare wrote about them; but the real value of incense,
of course, lies in its being a germ destroyer, a safeguard to the
priest. In the old days, when people did not know so much about health
as they do now, they used to come to church to give thanks for recovery
from smallpox while still in a state to give it to others.”

Here Helen came up. We had scarcely finished asking her news when Mr.
Z---- joined us.

“Looking at the tomb of Palestrina?” he said. “That reminds me, would
you ladies like to go and see the town from which he took his name? It
is an opportunity, the greatest living authority on polygonal walls is
going with us.”

“I never heard of a polygonal wall,” Helen began. (“You’d not give a
hoot to see one,” murmured Patsy.) “But I would go anywhere for a day in
the country this divine weather, provided the company was good.”

“And the luncheon,” Patsy put in.

Mr. Z---- smiled: “I think the ladies may trust me for that,” he said.
Then he gave Helen and me directions for meeting at the station and left
us.

“Z---- is a silly old gloat, but there is no malice in him,” Patsy said.
“His Antonio is the best cook in Rome. It is part of the law of
compensation that the biggest bores always have the best _chefs_.”

We had perfect weather for the trip to Palestrina. All the women, like
Helen, had come for the day’s outing in the country, the men were grimly
intent upon polygonal walls--all but one--Patsy, the uninvited, who
turned up at the station and said he “would go along to have a try at
the _vino di paese_ and to see if the girls of Palestrina were as pretty
as the girls of Præneste.” As we did not feel responsible for him (he is
a relation of the Z----’s) we were thankful to see his handsome face.
Express trains do not stop at Palestrina, so we had to take a local,
which crawled. One does not mind crawling across the Campagna, in sight
of the trees and tombs of the Via Appia, beside the long lines of brown
aqueducts, broken here and there into picturesque groups of arches. As
we approached the Alban hills we found a hazy scarf of pink gauze spread
about their feet and half way up to their knees; on nearer view this
proved to be fruit trees in blossom.

At the dull little station of Monte Compatri Colonna there was a delay.
Patsy, in search of diversion, tried to get out of the carriage. The
door was locked. He put a long leg out of the window and made as if he
would climb out. Excitement among the peasants on the platform.
Everybody talked at once. Four women and three men rushed to the window.

“_Eccellenza_, for charity’s sake, have patience! The door is capable of
being opened!” urged the vendor of _passa tempi_ (salted melon seeds).

An old woman, with a basket of assorted fruits, threw herself
passionately in the breach.

“For the love of the Madonna, _illustrissimo_, have a care, you will do
yourself an injury. The door opens, I assure you it is true. That
_ignorante_ of a guard. Where has he gone? The _capo stazione_ himself
should interest himself in your _signoria_.”

Patsy put out his head and one arm. The vendor of the straw-covered
flasks of red and white wine joined the group.

“This is a serious affair, _amici miei_,” he said. “Signori, restrain
the gentleman! Between ourselves now, is he mad? If so, my brother, who
is of the _carabinieri_, can easily be summoned.”

Patsy by this time had got one shoulder out and was frantically waving
an arm and a leg. That was too much for the immemorial beggar with the
head and beard of Jove, who for forty years has sat upon that platform
and begged. He laid down his tray of matches and hurried off on one leg
and a crutch to the office of the _capo stazione_. Meanwhile, the guard
came out of the restaurant furtively wiping his moustache. He rushed at
the carriage with his key. Only one person on the platform had
maintained his equilibrium,--the waiter from the restaurant, a man of
the world, continued to walk calmly up and down the platform, offering
his atrocious chiccory brew--he called it coffee--to the other
passengers. He rather superciliously let us alone.

The guard hurried to the window. “I asked the signori before I allowed
myself to attend to my duties at Colonna if any of the illustrious ones
desired to descend. You yourself, excellency, assured me you desired
nothing!” He fitted the key to the door as he spoke.

“Behold, did I not speak the truth?” said the fruit seller; “am I not
right? the door opens.”

Patsy leaned comfortably back in the corner and lighted a cigarette. The
_capo stazione_ arrived, hastily buttoning his gold-laced coat. He
looked daggers at the guard.

“What is wrong? If there has been any inattention it shall be reported.
How is this? One of the travellers obliged to get out of the window,
and now that the door is open nobody alights?”

“That gentleman,” said Patsy, nodding towards Mr. Z----, “wished to see
if he could climb out of the window. Do not trouble yourselves, he is
not mad, merely an original. So sorry you should have been disturbed.”
The _capo_ bowed politely to Patsy, fixed poor Z---- with a freezing
stare, and returned with olympian dignity to that stuffy seat of
authority, his office. The Jove-like beggar, leaning on his crutch, in
his curiosity to see us forgot to beg.

“_Un fiasco di vino!_” said the wine seller, thrusting a flask into the
carriage.

“_Portugalli!_” shrilled the old fruit woman.

“_Caffè due soldi la tazza_ (Coffee two cents a cup)!” cried the waiter.

“_Pronti_ (Ready)!” roared the guard.

“_Taratara!_” screamed the station master’s horn.

“_Partenza!_” and that was the last we saw of Monte Compatri Colonna.

Between Colonna and Palestrina Patsy allowed us to enjoy the view,
really well worth seeing. We had enchanting glimpses of the Alban,
Sabine, and Volscian mountains; the valleys between blazed with
wild-flowers. At the station the party divided, Mr. Z----, the expert
on polygonal walls, and the rest going in the stage, Patsy, Helen, and
ourselves crowding into a _botte_.

“The trouble with those fellows is,” said Patsy, “that they know too
much of one thing and too little of anything else. You’d be talked to
death and sick of the subject if I had not come along to save your
lives.”

“I _should_ like to know what we have come to see,” I feebly protested.

“Nonsense,” said Helen, “they have crammed it all out of books, you can
cram a great deal better afterwards. It takes the edge off to read too
much about a thing before you see it. Don’t read the guide-book till you
have seen the thing and got your own impression neat.”

The road from the station leads up a sharp incline, winding through the
steep and dirty streets of Palestrina, a hillside town, which stands
upon the ruins of the Colonna’s mediæval stronghold, which again stands
upon the ancient town of Præneste, extolled by the Latin poets. That
Præneste, with its magnificent Temple of Fortune, the resort of the
fashionable Romans of the days of Mæcenas, seems modern compared to the
ancient Præneste, whose ruins are found beneath it, and whose _arx_ was
the spot chosen for the picnic luncheon. It was a stiff climb. We left
the carriage at Castel San Pietro and scrambled to the summit where that
magnificent and indomitable race--Castellane calls them the
_Italiotti_--built their citadel. Here we saw the ruins of the polygonal
(we used to call them cyclopean) walls. Astonishing structures, making
the walls of the three later periods--the latest, exquisite brick-work
of the Empire--seem by comparison like the work of children! The huge
rocks are fitted together without cement of any sort, and in some places
the walls look as solid as the day they were built, long before Rome
was! To make room for our table-cloth, an old shepherd obligingly drove
his sheep a little lower down the mountain. He was knitting stockings
for one of his grandchildren; he has four to bring up. Their mother is
dead, their father--he went years ago to Buenos Ayres--has ceased to
write or to send them money.

A pretty girl spinning with a distaff asked shyly if she could help us.
Patsy sent her for water while he set the table.

“We could not have her handling the food, you know,” he said; “but she
is so decorative that we want to look at her while we eat and drink.
Antonio has outdone himself (he knew I was coming), this ham really has
been boiled in _vino di Montefiascone_, as I suggested. The girls of
Palestrina _are_ as handsome as the girls of Præneste.” Armida, our
girl, had come back, a dripping _conca_ poised on her head.

“How do you know so much about the girls of Præneste?” I asked.

“Go to the Kircheriano Museum and look at the Ficoronian Cista and you
will know as much as I do,” Patsy confessed. “It was found near here in
the necropolis. It is a green bronze toilet casket, with the most
corking pictures from the story of the Argonauts engraved upon it you
ever saw! Pollux has just licked Amycus, you know, for interfering with
the Greeks preempting the spring of water, and tied him up to a tree, as
he deserved. Then you have the Greeks drinking out of the spring. In the
harbor lies the good ship Argo; on shore you see Jason and Hercules, one
of the Argonauts in the attitude of boxing, a fat old Silenus mimicking
him. Female beauty is represented by Athena and Niké, who seem to be
offering a victor’s crown to the lucky Pollux. It’s up to date, I can
tell you. The girls are no prettier than Armida there; but find me the
man who can ‘do’ her like the fellow who engraved that Cista, and I will
pay him to make her portrait!”

“How long ago was the casket made?” Helen asked.

“If you must have a date, 700 B.C. is as good as another. Heigh ho! The
world’s grown lazy! All this talk about modern energy makes me tired!
Where’s the energy in any race on earth to-day to build an _arx_ like
this? to live on the top of a steep hill like this? to trundle itself
and its chattels up and down? Our civilization compared to Præneste’s is
barbarism by every standard I know.”

“You don’t know much,” said Helen. “_I_ know you have waited too long
for your luncheon. Your views will improve directly.”

As we ate our luncheon, Armida awkwardly weaving a garland of oak leaves
after a pattern Patsy made her, watched us with shy, hungry eyes. She
and I exchanged glances (not a word was spoken) which said,--

“Signora, I have rarely tasted white bread--never such a _pasticcio_ as
the _signorino_ is giving to the shepherd’s dog!”

“_Figlia mia_, all that remains of the feast shall be for you and the
shepherd; you will divide with him?”

“_Stia sicura_ (Rest assured)!” said Armida’s honest eyes.

There was wine in an amphora--how had Patsy managed it?--he poured the
first glass on the ground in libation.

Looking at Armida and raising his glass, “_Alle belle ragaze di
Palestrina!_” he said. The shepherd’s dog sniffed the spilt wine
scornfully.

“_Tutti gli Inglesi sono matti!_ (The English are all mad)!” muttered
the shepherd.

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, 1899.

June in Italy is heaven. The weather is delicious. Life is pleasant and
calm. J. has found a small American ice-chest, the only one in Rome; we
are as proud as peacocks about it; Pompilia shows it off as if it were
the great kohinoor. It is an economy in ice, which has only lately been
introduced, and is fabulously dear. Nena fetches a tiny slab of
artificial ice every afternoon, it is wrapped in thick felt, put into
the American ice-chest, where it keeps the milk and wine cool. Green
nuts are part of the

[Illustration: _The Lady K._

From a red chalk drawing in the Collection of Mr. Thomas W. Lawson]

[Illustration: Copyright, 1900, by John Elliott. From a Copley Print.
Copyright, 1901, by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston.]

summer bill of fare, fresh filberts in their jackets, green almonds and
English walnuts as much nicer fresh than dried as fresh figs are better
than dry, or grapes than raisins.

Ignazio, our gardener, handsome, sympathetic, with a timid laugh, a
hesitating manner, a real passion for his calling, was recommended to us
as knowing more about roses than any man in Rome. The burthen of caring
for our beloved flowers had become too great. The improvement since the
expert took hold and properly grafted our roses is astonishing. Ignazio
has to be restrained from quite ruining us. To him the natural order
would be to spend the greater part of one’s income upon one’s flowers--I
am not so sure he is not right! For weeks he has been talking about a
new rare flower--just the thing for the terrace--whose name he could not
remember. When I asked him he took off his old cap, rubbed his head in a
puzzled way, and complained that the English names were “too difficult.”
I caught his enthusiasm, ordered some of these rare exotics, though the
price was high. To-day arrived six fine specimens of the wild American
purple aster, which overruns the fields and roadsides at home!

Signor Giacomo Boni, the architect in charge of the public buildings of
ancient Rome, has a rival terrace on the roof of his house: we went to
see his Japanese lilies the other day. Fancy, he has a cherry tree with
ripe cherries on it, a peach tree with peaches, a tame starling in a
cage, and quite the most wonderful collection of plants and flowers I
ever saw in so small a space. Signor Boni has planted on the Palatine,
in the Forum, and in the Baths of Caracalla, the flowers and shrubs
mentioned in the classics as growing in those places. The good work is
beginning to tell already; now there are roses and fleur-de-lis growing
in the Forum. The vandalism which stripped the Colosseum of its glorious
robe of flowered green and exposed its gaunt skeleton to view, is at an
end, but the havoc it wrought is irreparable--at least in my lifetime.
Fancy, there were five hundred different varieties of wild-flowers
growing on that splendid old ruin. Many of these are unknown in other
parts of Europe and are supposed to have sprung from seeds that were
mixed in the various kinds of fodder imported from Africa to feed the
wild beasts which fought in the old blood-soaked arena.

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, August 3, 1899.

It was too hot for sleep last night, a rare thing in Rome. At half-past
four this morning, when I went out on the terrace to water the plants,
the smooth red tiles were still warm to bare feet. The Piazza of St.
Peter’s was a sea of fog, out of which loomed the lantern of Angelo’s
dome; no other part of the great church was visible. A white mist from
the Tiber rose like a wall between us and Mt. Soracte; the river and the
mountain Horace loved are still the dearest things in the wide view of
the Roman landscape. When the plants had been watered it was half-past
five, just the right time for bicycling, so we set out. At this hour few
people are about, save the drivers of the heavy wains of hay--drawn by
big, soft-eyed gray oxen with magnificent branching horns. These wagons
of fragrant hay are not allowed in the streets after eight o’clock in
the morning. Though the Forum was reached before six, Signor Boni and
his aids were already hard at work. Swarms of men, like so many busy
ants, were passing to and from the excavations, wheeling barrows full of
earth, returning a little later with empty barrows.

“Where do you put the rubbish that you take out?” I asked. The _capo_
smiled indulgently. “Every particle of the earth of the Forum is
sacred,” he said. “We skim it off carefully in layers, keeping each
layer quite separate from the others. Then we sift it layer by layer,
sort whatever it contains, examine each bit of broken glass, metal,
pottery, and, where it is possible, piece the fragments together.”

In a sacrificial layer, composed chiefly of the ashes and bones of
victims offered at the altars of the gods, the _capo_ lately found the
jaw bones of several large dogs. These did not properly belong here,
among the bones of beeves, sheep, and goats, the regulation sacrificial
animals. The layer in which they were found proved to be of the time of
Marcellus. Now, what were the bones of these big dogs doing there?

One dark night--it was in the days of Marcellus--the Goths descended for
the first time upon Rome, the citadel came within an ace of being
taken--would have been, but for the cackling of the silly geese which
roused the sleeping guards. The silly geese became sacred geese, and the
faithless watch-dogs, who had failed to bark and give the alarm, were
slaughtered at the altar,--and that is how the big canine jaw bones turn
up to-day in the sacrificial layer of Marcellus! The _capo’s_ dreamy
blue eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, glowed with an inner light as he
unfolded this theory. Imagination, you see, is as important to the
successful archæologist as it is to any other discoverer. He must have
other things as well--a thorough knowledge of the classics, for
instance. Did not Mme. Schlieman learn the whole of Homer by heart, to
aid her husband in his search for the tomb of Agamemnon?

If in reading Tacitus or Livy the _capo_ finds mention of a missing
building or statue, he goes and looks for it in the place where
according to the historians it ought to be--and where, nine times out of
ten, he finds it! While he talked to us his eyes never left the skilful
hands of a workman patiently matching together pieces of brown
terra-cotta from a large pile of shards.

“If we could only make up one complete tile!” he sighed.

We were in the temporary museum where the latest “finds” of the Forum
are kept. The man at the next table was putting together a really
beautiful vessel of dark-blue glass. It might have been the Myrrhene
goblet of Petronius!

“The tiles are so ugly, so monotonous--why should you care? I could
understand, now, if a piece of that enchanting blue glass were missing!”
I said.

“The cup is only a cup,--beautiful if you will,--but what does it teach
us? nothing new. If we could find a whole tile, now, it would fix the
date of a building we are in doubt about.”

Scientific methods, you see; even in Rome we cannot escape them! Then we
went and looked at the spot where the Jewish citizens of Rome piously
burned the body of Julius Cæsar, and at what remains of the house where
Cæsar lived, a corner of the dining-room, with the white mosaic
pavement, and a piece of wall painted with a decoration of fruit,
flowers, green trees, and a pointed bamboo trellis, in the same style as
the Villa Livia, built by the widow of Augustus, who, perhaps, had
admired Aunt Calpurnia’s dining-room, and when her time came to build
imitated it!

In the house of the Vestal Virgins we saw some fine pavements lately
uncovered. Vesta is by far the most interesting of the Roman
divinities. Is there a shrine to her at Radcliffe? There should be; we
owe Rome the “higher education,” as we owe her the law we live by, the
army we conquer by. Close to the Temple of Vesta we saw the place where
earthquakes were foretold by the simplest contrivance. On a white marble
platform finely adjusted weights were placed so as to oscillate with the
first, otherwise imperceptible, tremors of the earth; in this way the
knowing ones were enabled to foretell the earthquakes to the populace.
Not far from here is the point where lightning once struck, making a
hole ever after held sacred. It was turned into a sacred well, wherein
jewels, cups, and other precious offerings were thrown by the devout or
the superstitious. Both these shrines are very near the Temple of Vesta.
Was it by chance that the fanes of the three things primitive man fears
most, fire, earthquake, and lightning, should be so near together? The
_capo_ thinks not.

“Now come and see the Republican well I have just found,” he said,
leading the way to a deep pit in the form of an _amphora_, with smooth
rounded sides lined with cement.

“Notice the work they did in the days of the Republic; it is far better
than the work of the Empire. See this cement, as perfect as the day it
was laid.”

“What did you find in this well?” we asked.

“Come and see. Here are a great number of styluses--the Roman pens used
for writing on wax tablets” (do you suppose some poor devil of a
literary man threw them in in a moment of despair?) “and the entire
contents of a Republican butcher’s shop. See, there is the great
cleaver, these are the knives--even the wooden handles are intact. These
round stones are the weights, here is the thigh bone of the last ox
slaughtered before the shop came to grief, and here--take it carefully,
it is of terra-cotta--is the butcher’s lamp. Do you make out the design?
It is in the shape of an inflated oxhide.”

I never saw the like of that lamp! Of all the precious things the _capo_
has unearthed, I most covet the Republican butcher’s squat little
earthenware lamp with the neck of the skin pursed together to hold the
wick.

“Now come and look at the true Via Sacra; you see it lies several feet
below the road we used to call the Sacred Way. Do you observe how much
finer this early pavement is than the later paving? But wait, I shall
show you better yet,--the earlier the work, the better the
workmanship.”

As we stood on the large squares of smooth gray stone, a cloud veiled
the hot August sun, a shadow crossed the pavement. Might it not have
been just here that Horace tacked to avoid meeting that bore Crispinus?
When midsummer comes and everybody goes away, and there remains only
Rome, ourselves, and the mighty ghosts,--these grow so real that I
wonder if I dreamed the tea-party-picnicking Rome of winter and spring.

“Here is the Basilica Emilia. We should not have been able to excavate
this if it had not been for Mr. St. Clair Baddeley, who raised the money
in England to buy the land and indemnify the owners of the houses we
were obliged to pull down. Look at these two delightful bas-reliefs;
have you ever seen such a treatment of the acanthus?”

The reliefs are the most florid--one might almost say
“baroque”--acanthus designs I have ever seen. In one the flower in the
centre of the “curly cue” ends in a prancing horse; the other terminates
in some apochryphal beast, like a dragon.

“Wait, wait till I make a copy of this adorable white and green
pavement,” I cried. It was a geometrical design in Emilia’s Basilica. A
design that I have never seen either in Egypt or Greece.

“For that you will not need me,” said the _capo_; “it is growing late
and hot; now for the Lapis Niger!” Like a child he had kept the best of
the feast for the last. As we went, I picked up a small piece of
iridescent glass, opal, rose, and pearl, a bit of heaven’s rainbow dug
from the “sacred earth.”

“What might this have been?” I asked.

“That we shall see, perhaps part of a tear bottle, perhaps a fragment of
the vessel in which the vestals daily brought lustral water for the
altars from the Fountain of Egeria!” Was he laughing at me?

I shall not forget the sensation produced by the first sight of the
Lapis Niger, the black stone of the so-called tomb of Romulus. Whether
the smooth slab of black marble actually covered the ashes of Romulus,
or was a later monument put up to his memory, has not yet, I believe,
been established. They do know that the inscription on the cippus
beneath the stone is written in the most ancient Latin which has yet
come to light--the epigraphists are still cracking their brains trying
to read it. Is it not pleasant to have the sceptical German historians
routed? To have our Romulus and Remus given back to us, our Tarquins,
our Numa Pompilius, and Egeria? To tell the truth, I never gave them up,
I always kept a sneaking belief in demigods and heroes, took Hawthorne’s
word against the Teutons. Now I am being justified right and left. Boni
finds the Tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, Dr. Evans finds the palace
of Minos, and the labyrinth of the Minotaur in Crete.

To comfort-loving persons Rome is the most satisfactory place in the
world for the study of man--from the savage of thirty centuries ago in
his tree coffin, fished up from the bottom of Lake Trasimeno (now at the
Museum Papa Giulio), to Victor Emmanuel in his tomb at the Pantheon.
Think of it, the first king of Young Italy sleeping in a temple of
Ancient Rome which has been in use ever since it was built in the year
27 B.C. Athens is a thousand times more beautiful than Rome, but to the
ultra modern Greece seems on the outskirts of “to-day.” Here, here in
Rome, we fancy we are in the midst of things, and creature comforts are
still to be had, as in the days of Lucullus (I recommend you an
_omelette soufflée aux surprises à la Grand Hotel_! Outside an ordinary
hot soufflée--the surprise is the heart, cold sublimated chocolate
ice-cream)!

Not long since, while lunching at that luxurious restaurant, we became
aware of a personage at the next table. Everybody looked at him; it was
impossible not to look at him. He was a large, masterful man with a high
color, young gray hair, and a look of power I have not often met. We
began to guess his nationality. I immediately claimed him. “He is an
American, a Western senator, from Montana or Washington State.”

There was something large and dauntless about him, the free look of one
coming from a young country.

“Please find out who that gentleman at the next table is?” our host said
to the waiter.

The man seemed surprised at the question.

“That is Cecil Rhodes, sir,” he answered.

After that we could not help catching some of his talk--perhaps we did
not try very hard--it was brilliant, exhilarating, and cordial. His
guests were hardly more _en rapport_ with him than the rest of us in
the room. He was not unconscious that the people who sat near, the
waiters, even the sphinx-like manager, hovering in the offing with
impassive face, were thrilled by being in his company: nor could his
attitude be called conscious. He merely seemed aware of us, could no
more help dominating the chance crowd in a fashionable restaurant than
his fellows in the Transvaal.

It happened that after lunch we took our friends “sightseeing” to the
Kircheriano Museum, where we found one of the earliest Roman citizens
and his wife, still lying side by side in the very earth the mourners
threw over them, his rude stone weapons, her primitive household
utensils close to their hands. There, you see, are the two ends of your
chain of interest (there is not a missing link between),--the
prehistoric man at the Kircheriano Museum and the man who is making
history, Cecil Rhodes, on his way to South Africa, lunching at the Grand
Hotel!

XII

THE ANNO SANTO

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, February 7, 1900.

“If I am ever a rich man,--” Patsy began.

“Which heaven forfend--you have not the gift!” said the monsignore.

“Wait and see!--I shall build a great church.”

“Like St. Peter’s there?”

We were on the terrace. The sun was setting behind the chapel of the
Vatican. There was still light enough for the yellow of the sun-soaked
façade, the pale blue of the dome, to tell against the gray and rosy
sky.

“Oh, make it the Parthenon! They both give a fellow the same sort of
feeling as being in love does, or seeing Niagara.”

“It is not a bad use to put a fortune to,” the monsignore agreed.

“It is about time the artists had their innings!” Patsy declared. “I
should like to be referee. Gladiators, prize-fighters wouldn’t be in
it. What fun _can_ there be in backing such creatures, or even a horse?
I would rather stake my fortune on an architect like Bramante--trust my
future reputation to a painter like Pinturricchio than to a Flying
Childers or a Goldsmith Maid.”

“First catch your hare,” said the monsignore.

“The woods are full of ’em. Give the artists a chance, and you’ll see
the trouble is not with them! The opportunity must come first. A country
has the art it deserves. When we Americans want beauty as much as we
want rapid transit we shall get it.”

“There are _some_ signs,” said the monsignore. “We have art patrons who
pay enormous sums for old masters.”

“Our art patrons lack imagination,” said Patsy. “It is so easy, so
obvious, to buy ‘old masters,’ to patronize Leonardo da Vinci and
Botticelli! I should pick my men, give ’em the track, and let ’em show
their paces. Wait till I build my cathedral: you will see an architect,
a painter, and a sculptor or two.”

“‘The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, wrought with a sad sincerity,’”
quoted the monsignore. He had come to tell us about the Pope’s opening
the _Porta Santa_ on Christmas eve,--the first of the many functions of
this _Anno Santo_.

Finally we “muzzled” Patsy, and the monsignore seized his chance to
speak.

“As the ceremony was in the portico of St. Peter’s,” he said, “a
comparatively small place, very few invitations were issued. The papal
throne was erected near the _Porta Santa_,--the Jubilee door,--it is the
one on the extreme right of the portico, you will remember it by the
cross upon it. The Pope knocked three times upon the _Porta Santa_ with
a mallet, saying as he did so, “_Aperite mihi portas justitiae_ (Open to
me the door of justice).” At the words the door (which was last opened
by Leo the Twelfth, in 1825) fell away as if by magic, and His Holiness
walked alone into the vast empty church, where there was no other living
being but himself. He tottered down the aisle, past the splendid tombs
of his predecessors, beneath that unmarked sepulchre over the door,
where Pius the Ninth lies waiting the day when he must make room for him
in his tomb as he made room for him on his throne. At the shrine of St.
Peter the Pope knelt and said a prayer. For me that was the great
moment in the whole gorgeous ceremony.”

“It all comes back to the simple human situation of an old man passing
the tomb where he soon must lie!” was Patsy’s comment.

“It is just the simple human situation that the Church always comes back
to,” said the monsignore.

“Oh, I say! simple, you know! That’s putting it a little strong. The
scene you describe is simple and touching, but, as a rule, the services
over there are more gorgeous and theatrical than religious!”

“Granted,--St. Peter’s is the stage on which the dramas of the church
are played. Why not? Why not use every art to the glory of God--music,
the drama, all the rest? There are a hundred quiet parish churches where
one can go for devotion and aspiration.”

Patsy’s company is always stimulating, but he rather interfered with my
getting all the information I wanted from the monsignore. I did manage
to extract the facts that the _Anno Santo_ was instituted by Boniface
VIII., in 1300, that it was originally meant to celebrate it every
hundred years; that the Romans petitioned to have the time shortened to
every fifty years, then to thirty-three years (the supposed earthly life
of Christ), and finally to every twenty-five years; that at the five
other Basilicas in Rome ceremonies like those at St. Peter’s were
celebrated on the same day--a cardinal opening the _Porta Santa_ in
each, and that during the _Anno Santo_ plenary indulgence is obtainable
by all Catholics who pass a certain number of times in a given number of
days, through the holy doors of St. Peter’s, and the five other
Basilicas, repeating the appointed prayers.

“Every twenty-five years, you say?” Patsy insisted, “and the last
Jubilee was in 1825--how is that?”

“In 1850 and again in 1875 Rome was so unsettled that the observance of
the _Anno Santo_ was not expedient,” said the monsignore, shortly.

“Let me see,” mused Patsy; “in 1850 Pius the Ninth was at Gaeta, trying
a change of air for his health, and Mazzini was at the head of the Roman
Republic. In 1875, Pius still thought that the Dukes of Savoy were only
casual visitors and had not yet realized that they had come to Rome to
stay. Isn’t that about the size of it?”

“My dear boy,” said the monsignore imperturbably, “_now_ you are talking
about things you do _not_ understand.” He talked of other things for a
few moments and then went away.

On Christmas Eve the pilgrims began to arrive in torrents, and have been
pouring in and out of the city ever since. They will not be allowed to
come in July and August--supposed to be the least healthy months. They
have gathered from the uttermost parts of the earth hordes of strangers
invading Rome as I believe it has not been invaded since the days of
Attila and his Huns. From the terrace we see pilgrims from all the
Catholic nations of the earth pass to bow the knee and drop the _obolo_
at the feet of the Prisoner of the Vatican. These vast pilgrimages,
sometimes several thousand strong--are admirably managed. A dearth of
cabs is the first sign we notice of their arrival. The piazza is
deserted, not a cab in sight. A little later a procession of cabs,
crowded with pilgrims (six to a carriage) and their belongings--the
queerest boxes, bales, bundles begin to rattle across the piazza to the
vast buildings in the rear of the Vatican where the pilgrims lodge. They
usually stay three days; during that time they are received by the
Pope, visit all the Basilicas, see the sights, and depart richer in
experience and plenary indulgence, leaving the Pope, the shop keepers,
hotel keepers, and cabmen richer in money. Each flood gilds (or silver
plates) poor old Rome till it shines as it has not shone in years.

I did not suppose there were so many splendid costumes left in the world
as have passed through the Piazza of St. Peter’s and under my eyes
during these few months! Hungarians in tight-fitting black breeches,
jackets trimmed with black astrakhan and long high boots. Herzegovinians
with wonderful garments of white sheepskin, embroidered in red silk
outlined designs (the woolly side of the sheepskin is worn next the
person, the outside looks like parchment), fur-trimmed boots, hair cut
square across the shoulders, faces of rapt devotion. The Poles were a
superb group, the women wore costumes of striped vermilion and emerald
green, the men, scarlet breeches, green jackets, and picturesque woollen
caps. There were Cossacks from the river Don, with long, gray woollen
caftans down to their heels, high pointed caps, and cartridge belts over
their shoulders, they would be ugly customers to come up against on a
less peaceful excursion. While driving, we passed one Don Cossack who
reminded us so vividly of Taras Bulba, the hero of Gogol’s Iliad of the
North, that we followed him for half an hour, as he stalked about the
city, looking at the sights as if they were all perfectly familiar to
him. He was a giant with a mane of bronzed hair, dark eyes, high cheek
bones, and a look of indomitable power, of silent reserved strength,
that made the careless casual passer-by seem an effete, over-civilized
being. He wore jewel-handled daggers stuck in a waist belt, fastened
with turquoises “as big as my two thumbs.” He must be “somebody” at
home.

The other evening J. brought home the news that there were a lot of
pilgrims lodged in the wing of the Palazzo Torlonia, opposite his
studio. The next morning R. and I hurried over to the Borgo St. Angelo
to see what was to be seen. The Palazzo Giraud Torlonia, which has a
splendid front on the Borgo Nuovo, only a block away from the
Rusticucci--has two long wings in the rear, with a courtyard between
them, the entrance to both wings being on the Borgo St. Angelo, rather a
squalid back street. The studio is a vast room as big as a church on
the second floor. When my mother was in Rome, on her wedding journey,
she danced in this room at one of the famous balls, given by old
Torlonia, the banker prince, the founder of the family, and grandfather
of the present incumbent, J.’s landlord. The studio--at the time J. took
it the only available one in Rome large enough for his purpose--could
only be had by hiring the whole wing, with its three stories, the right
to _re-let_ being refused. This makes him master of all he surveys, as
the grim, stone-paved courtyard, with its ever-flowing fountain fringed
with maidenhair fern, goes with his wing.

I received a shock on entering the studio, and looking at the big
picture for the first time in days. The little blindfold Love who led
the procession of the centuries in The Flight of Time, has been painted
out! He now exists only in my memory, and in the cartoon, a red chalk
drawing hanging in our hall. Though the composition is better without
him, it gave me a pang to find him gone. To console me, I found three
portrait studies of the beautiful Lady K.

From the studio windows we could see into the vast high rooms of the
opposite ell, which is hired for the pilgrims, when, as on this
occasion, they cannot all be accommodated in the huge _lazzaretto_ the
Pope built during the last cholera summer. That was in 1884. Naples was
decimated by the disease; everybody believed that the cholera would come
to Rome (everybody except J., who calmly passed the summer here). The
Pope built the great _lazzaretto_ against the cholera’s coming; King
Humbert, of the high courage, went to meet the cholera, went to
pest-stricken Naples, walked through the hospital wards where the
cholera patients lay, spoke comfortably to them, won new glory for the
brave house of Savoy, a fresh hold on his people’s hearts. As the
_lazzaretto_--it has never been used as such--was not big enough to hold
the French pilgrimage, some of it spilled over into the empty wing of
the Torlonia Giraud Palace, across the courtyard from the studio.

When R. and I arrived on the scene it was the hour of bedmaking. We
could see the neat, light figures of the nuns (to whose care the
entertainment of the pilgrims is entrusted) tucking in the sheets,
smoothing out the pillows of the long lines of white cots that filled
the rooms. On the sidewalk, outside the green door--all our doors in
the Borgo seem to be green--sat a group of old men smoking the solemn,
after-breakfast pipe. Feeling that we must see the pilgrims at nearer
view, we went down to the street and out of our door just in time to
meet a rosy young sister as she came out of the opposite door with a
little old peasant woman, whose face was wrinkled and brown as an
English walnut. The old peasant wore over a full white linen shirt a
dark cloth jacket cut square at the bosom, with straps going over the
shoulders. The double-breasted jacket was fastened with silver buttons
and heavily embroidered in a charming pattern with variegated silks. On
her head was a plain white cap of sheer muslin turned back over the
ears, and hanging to the shoulders. Under the muslin cap was a sort of
gilt skull-cap. She wore a heavy plaited skirt of dark blue broadcloth,
sabots painted black, long earrings of filigree gold inset with seed
pearls. Even beside the pure linen of the sister, she positively shone
with cleanliness.

“Look well at that jacket,” I said to R., “did you ever see one like it
before?”

“Why, it is _our_ Breton jacket!”

_You_ perhaps remember that at the old yellow house where R. lives
there is a trunk full of “dressing up things,” the theatrical wardrobe
of the children, largely made up of the old finery of three preceding
generations!

“Did you ever see that cap before?” I asked R.

“Why it’s grandmama’s cap!”

“Long ago, when you were only a baby, grandmother and I passed a summer
in Brittany. At Quimper, where we spent some happy weeks, a jacket like
that was made for me, and we found the one and only model for
grandmama’s cap.”

The little old peasant woman carried a large blue cotton umbrella, with
time-yellowed ivory handle and points, a perfect ark, under which three
even four generations might take refuge from a deluge. I looked at her
so intently, with such a passion of longing memory, that she must have
seen something more than common curiosity in my glance, for she gave me
a second look less preoccupied, more gentle than the first, and then
paused. I grasped the opportunity, and going up to her asked in French
how things were at Quimper? She listened patiently, politely,
understanding nothing of what I said till I pronounced the magic word
“Quimper.” Then the old eyes grew keen and intent. She put out a hand
and answered me in a flood of kindly Breton, whose sound only was
familiar to me. For some minutes we stood there in the middle of the
Borgo St. Angelo, shaking hands, looking intently at each other, first
one, then the other repeating the word “Quimper!” To her it meant home;
to me, the one thing dearer! Then with a last tightening of the hands we
parted. We recognized other of the Breton costumes, from
St.-Pol-de-Leon, Douarnenez, the Morbihan, we remembered having seen
some of them at the great pardon of Ploërmel. The caps of Quimper are
quite distinct from the caps of Quimperle, you understand, though the
towns are not far apart!

That afternoon, with a roll of thunder drums and a flash of lightning,
the deluge descended upon the Borgo. I rushed to the watch-tower--our
upper terrace, to see the storm. From the four quarters of the sky the
lightning swords smote at each other; from the soft white clouds above
the Castle St. Angelo came rose-colored lightning with a growl; from a
purple rack over St. Peter’s a piercing yellow zigzag, like a Saracen
blade, followed by the crack of cannon. Veils of rain fell, mixed with
the white spray of the fountains, and were driven in smoky sheets across
the square. The piazza was alive with pilgrims coming away from St.
Peter’s, where service was just over, the steps were black with people.
The pilgrims scattered like leaves before the storm; the skirts of women
and priests were blown about, like the bewitched draperies of the
Bernini statues on the façade of the church. In the midst of the
hurrying, scurrying crowd I made out the blue umbrella ark of Quimper,
valiantly held up by a tall young peasant; my little old woman--perhaps
his mother--paddled along on one side, a stout wench--perhaps his
wife--on the other. The cabs were all snatched up in a moment. Down in
the Borgo I could see the _gobbo_ waiting for me at our door. I had to
keep a pressing engagement and dared not delay till the tempest passed,
lest the _gobbo_ and his cab be ravished from my sight. As we rattled
along the Borgo Nuovo, I recognized the _parroco_; he was without an
umbrella and was getting soaked to the skin. As we would pass his door
it seemed the part of friendship to give him a lift.

“Stop!” I cried to the _gobbo_; “the _parroco_ is going our way, we will
take him home.”

“There is no use in stopping,” said the _gobbo_. I insisted. Sulky and
grumbling he drew up just outside the hospital of the Santo Spirito. The
water was rushing through the gutter like a small millstream.

“Jump in, _padre_, we will take you home.”

“No, no. Thank you--it is impossible!”

I persisted.

“Drive on!” he cried impatiently to the _gobbo_. To me more gently, “It
would not do for me to be seen driving with a lady.”

As the _gobbo_ whipped up the old white horse, a crowded carriage
containing four women and two foreign-looking priests passed us. I
looked back at the _parroco_; he shrugged his shoulders, his lips formed
the words, “What can you expect? They are French!”

“What did I tell you, _Signora mia_?” murmured the _gobbo_. “It would
have been a scandal for the poor _parroco_ to be seen driving with you!”

Wasn’t that slap at the French nice? The _parroco_ served his two years
in the army when he was young; he is a good Italian, a son of the soil,
a son of the Church. The passions of his race are strong in him, and in
spite of his cassock he hates a Frenchman!

Coming home late that evening we found behind our door a small wallet
lined with coarse red morocco. It contained nothing but memoranda of
modest expenditures:

Cab, one franc.

Candles, six sous.

Tobacco, fifty centimes.

Rosary of amethyst beads (for Berthe), four francs.

Souvenirs of Rome, seven francs, etc.

Crabbedly written on the flyleaf was the address of a priest of
Vaucluse. _Vaucluse!_ Isn’t that a name to conjure with? We read the
poor priest’s case as easily as his simple record of expenses. No people
are quite so attentive to the pilgrims as the “light-fingered gentry.”
The thief who stole the pocket-book, after taking out whatever of value
it contained, threw it into our doorway to be rid of it. J. has sent it
by post to the priest at Vaucluse; it will at least help him to make up
his accounts.

“Souvenirs,” always a staple of Roman trade, are more in evidence in the
shop windows than ever. The French pilgrims buy a great many souvenirs.
We saw our old friend from Quimper in a shop in the Borgo. To get
another look at her, and to show her to Patsy, who was with me, we went
in and looked at souvenirs. Besides the “articles of religion” there
were semi-religious articles; spoons, pens, pins, a thousand useless
nothings bearing the triple crown, the keys of Peter, the sacred
initials. The shop-keeper laid a tray full before Patsy, who turned them
over indifferently. “Fancy keeping stamps in this,” he held up a box
with the white dove of the _Spirito Santo_ inlaid upon the cover, “or
cutting _Punch_ with that!” he displayed a paper knife with the figure
of the Lamb. “I say, you know, the common use the shop-keepers put these
sacred symbols to is more than I can stand!”

The shop-keeper thought he understood; we caught his whisper to his
wife, “They are not Christians, they are Saracens!” to us he said, “Have
patience, sir, here is your affair!”

He opened a drawer under the counter. It contained the same souvenirs,
the same boxes, spoons, pens, paper-knives, what-nots, with Mahomedan
symbols, instead of Christian--the crescent, the star, the scimitar, the
monogram of the prophet.

“No, not quite our affair,” said Patsy. “We are not Mahomedans.”

The shop in which we were chaffering is in the very shadow of Peter’s
dome; the bells in the clock tower were ringing the _Ave_.

The cry is, Still they come! Pilgrims, pilgrims, pilgrims. By just
sitting tight on our terrace and using our eyes, the uttermost parts of
Christendom have been brought to us. Sardinians, for instance. When
Patsy came back from his moufflon hunting trip in Sardinia, and talked
familiarly about “Sards,” we were devoured with curiosity to see them
for ourselves. A week after, the “Sards” arrived in force. They are more
like Corsicans, or even Spaniards, than like Italians; they have grave,
dark, impassive faces, and an expression of sombre reserve. The men’s
dress is in keeping with their character; a black woollen, knitted
bonnet, like a sailor’s cap, hangs on one side to the shoulder,
close-fitting jacket, leggings, and sash, all black. Their coarse
homespun linen shirts, made very full in the bosom and sleeves, and worn
without starch, are a great improvement on the dreadful stiff, white
armor in which our men encase themselves for their sins! The “Sards’”
only ornaments were silver buckles worn at the knees and on the shoes.

One morning J., who had started early for the studio, came back to tell
me that a group of Filipinos had just gone over to St. Peter’s.

“How do you know they are Filipinos?”

“I don’t _know_; they look like two Filipino art students who used to be
in Rome. One of them was named Luna. He was the best draughtsman in the
studio; he beat everybody at drawing; seemed to have a dash of the
Japanese dexterity.”

“Was he any relation to General Luna?”

“Only his brother,” said J. Now that is Rome, and that is J.!

I hurried over to St. Peter’s and caught up with the Filipinos before
they had made the third chapel of prayer. They are small, swarthy men;
their faces show a strange mingling of races, something of the
Malay, he Mongol, the Latin, with a fourth element I did not
recognize,--rather deadly looking folk, I thought, but very devout in
their behavior at church.

When royalty comes to the Vatican there is a deal of pother. The morning
of the King of Siam’s visit to the Pope, we were waked at dawn by the
carts fetching the royal yellow sand, and the men spreading it thick
over the streets where the wheels of royalty were to pass. The King,
whom we saw perfectly, is a fierce-looking little fellow; he was dressed
in quite the most lovely uniform I have ever seen; white broadcloth,
embroidered in gold. Do you suppose their good clothes are any
mitigation to the _ennui_ of sovereigns? I should think they might be.

Easter Sunday, 1900.

We thought we had seen Rome crowded before, but we had not! During the
past week, the crowds have been almost inconceivable. By Wednesday all
the bathrooms at the Grand Hotel that could be spared had been turned
into bedrooms. Last night a pair of travellers slept in the red plush
cushioned elevator, and two in the big comfortable hotel omnibus. Cabs
are a rare commodity--even the _gobbo_ has deserted us and hired himself
out by the week to the pilgrims. The electric cars (did I tell you they
had put these pests in under our very windows?) are so jammed that we go
for the most part “shanks’ mare.” Many of our friends have let their
apartments, and gone away for the rest of the season. We could have got
a good price for ours; but in spite of the undeniable inconvenience (the
cost of provisions has almost doubled), we would not have missed the
experience. The city has been a Babel of foreign tongues, a kaleidescope
of foreign faces and costumes. One tastes life as from a goblet filled
and brimming over with sparkling, heady wine. That old gogpate, Z----,
has let his villa, carriage, servants, even his precious Antonio, the
best cook in Rome. He said to J., “I cannot afford to stay in Rome when
the price of _filet_ has doubled and I can get my whole year’s rent by
letting the villa for three months.”

“We cannot afford _not_ to stay in Rome when it is so interesting,” said
J. There you have the two ways of looking at life--the Philistine’s and
the artist’s!

We have taken part in a canonization--there remained but that--of all
the ceremonials on “that stage of the Church” incomparably the most
sumptuous we have seen. When I heard that the new saint’s name was La
Salle, stirred by memories of Parkman’s “Discovery of the Great West,” I
insisted upon having tickets to one of the private tribunes. I confess
it was a disappointment to find that we were making a saint of the
wrong Lasalle, _not_ our own René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle,
but another doubtless excellent person described as “a distinguished
educator priest.” You have heard about so many ceremonies that I will
only speak of the _river_ of bishops! I did not suppose there were so
many bishops in the world. They passed down the vast church in a line of
seething white and gold, stretching from the entrance down the nave to
the very chair of Peter behind the high altar. Every bishop carried a
tall white wax torch, whose yellow flame lighted up his white and gold
vestments, his gold-tipped mitre and crozier. I shall never forget that
dazzling splendor! I have seen so many of these great pageants that I am
rather _blasée_ about them, but those gorgeous bishops in their
immaculate white and gold robes outshone even the arrogant vermilion
cardinals, the purple canons with their gray fur capes--even that man of
ivory and iron, Leo XIII., carried aloft in the Sedia Gestatoria, on the
shoulders of six crimson lackeys, the triple crown blazing on his head.

On the 31st of May I happened in to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a dear
church, built on the ruins of an ancient temple of Minerva. Fra Angelico
is buried here (how can his native Fiesole spare his bones)? There is an
ancient Greek sarcophagus, with Hercules taming the Nemean lion in
relief; there is a picture of Torquemada, the terrible confessor of
Isabella; there is an adorable flower-bespattered tomb carved by that
sweetest of statuaries, Mino da Fiesole, and a hundred other “features”!
In the piazza outside stands an engaging marble elephant, with the
smallest of Egyptian obelisks on his back; altogether the place is a
good example of what one is forever harking back to,--Rome’s golden
blending of things Greek, Egyptian, classic, pagan, early Christian,
renaissance, and rococo!

In the pulpit who should be thundering away, whacking the dusty crimson
cushions till the beautiful old carved pulpit shook, but our friend the
_parroco_! He seemed so much in earnest that I paid two cents for a
chair and sat down to listen to him. His subject was the erudition of
Mary, “the most learned woman,” he said, “who has ever lived. Her
knowledge of languages--she spoke at least twenty--proves this. She is
known to have talked with Moabites, Samaritans, Egyptians, and other
persons, to the number of twenty different nationalities.” The
hypothesis that some of these persons may have spoken Aramaic, Mary’s
own language, was not admitted by the preacher.

Coming out after church, I overheard one well-dressed _contadina--senza
cappello_ (without a hat), a social grade is marked by the wearing of a
hat--say to another peasant woman,--

“My son has preached a new sermon on the Madonna on each of the
thirty-one days of her month. He has done well.” I thought he had!

It was the _parroco’s_ mother. She had the same soft dark eyes, the same
mouth, the same smile--the mother for whose sake, as he himself told us,
he became a priest. “_Poverella_,” he said, “it was her wish; I am all
that she has; how could I disappoint her? and she believes that one day
I shall receive the cardinal’s hat!”

He had come as he always does, the Saturday before Easter, to bless the
house. Pompilia and Filomena had been on their marrow-bones for a week,
rubbing, scrubbing, polishing, setting the house in order for the rite.
On the kitchen dresser the prescribed food to be eaten on Easter Sunday
was neatly arranged: eggs and _mortadella_ for breakfast; lamb, green
peas, a certain broth made with lemon and eggs, served only on this day
of the year, and the sweet dish already prepared,--what the Italians
call _zuppa Inglese_, and we call Italian cream! In a vase were
carefully preserved the blossoms of wall flowers, stocks, and violets,
from the sepulchre of Holy Thursday at the church near by in the Piazza
Scossa Cavalli; these, according to tradition, must deck our Easter
dinner table. It was four o’clock when the _parroco_ reached our house.
He was very smart in his neat beretta,--a high, square, black silk
cap,--his best white linen cotta trimmed with handsome lace, freshly
starched and ironed. It was “done up,” I’ll be bound, by that good brown
mother of his. He was followed by an imp of a boy with the oddest snub
nose, and hair growing almost down to his eyebrows, who made the
responses and carried the silver holy-water vessel by a pair of
enchanting wrought handles. We formed a procession, headed by the
_parroco_ and the imp; next came the _padrona di casa_ (myself); behind
me walked Pompilia the cook in the time-honored striped black silk which
I had given to Nena, and she, “_per miseria_,” had sold to the cook;
after her, Filomena, the prettiest girl in the Borgo, in her best blue
frock and a rose in her hair; the procession was brought up in the rear
by Nena,--the witch, the snuff-taker, the footman, the mainstay and
comfort of the whole household. She had borrowed a clean apron, smoothed
her rough, gray hair, and redeemed her coral beads and gold earrings
from pawn at the Monte di Pieta. There were flowers everywhere in the
house, the terrace had been rifled, roses, roses, roses, red, pink,
saffron. In the very best vase were a single white rose from my mother’s
favorite tree, the Catherine Cook, and one mammoth pink one from Captain
Christy. We marched first to the salon, the most honorable room. The
_parroco_ dipped a silver sprinkler in the lustral water, which he
sprinkled in four directions, north, south, east, west, saying as he did
so, “Bless, O Lord, this place, that in it may be health, chastity,
victory, virtue, humility, goodness, sweetness, the fulness of law and
thanksgiving, and may this blessing abide in this place and upon all
those who dwell herein.”

Whether by chance or intention, a few drops fell upon a group of family
portraits hanging on the wall. Our dear sunny chamber was next blessed,
then the dining-room, the den, finally the servants’ quarters and the
kitchen. In each room the prayer was repeated, the water sprinkled. The
_parroco_ was in a hurry, he could not wait to taste a _gocciatino di
vino_ or a bit of the _pizze_ Filomena’s mother had sent us from her
home in Umbria,--there were many more houses to be blessed before
nightfall. We went with him to the door, shook hands, slipping into his
palm a small envelope--the imp carried openly the silver plate in which
I dropped his share of the modest offering, then with hasty bows and
smiles and “_buona pasqua_ (happy Easter)” the pair of them clattered
down the long _travertina_ staircase, past the recumbent Etruscan
ladies, with their button-like eyes, who guard our stair, leaving me to
enjoy our clean, sweet-smelling house. On the terrace an hour later,
drinking in the glory of the sunset, came an odd sense of the fitness
and familiarity of it all. This blessing the house, the food, the
penates, the tools, the effigies of ancestors is the Little Ambervalia
Pater describes so deliciously in Marius, the Epicurean; there is, too,
an echo in it of the Vestalia, the festival in honor of Vesta, held at
the house of the Vestal Virgins on the 9th of June, “after which the
temple was closed for five days for ceremonial cleansing!” At home, in
God’s own country, the ceremony survives under the name of spring
cleaning. It was a wonderful stormy sunset; St. Peter’s and the piazza
seen in this ferment of light and shadow recalled a curious allegorical
design of Bernini’s, in which the two curving wings of his colonnade are
made to suggest the arms of Christ’s Vicar, spread out to enfold the
world, Angelo’s dome being worked in as a sort of papal tiara floating
over the whole.

XIII

THE QUEEN’S VISIT

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, Easter, 1900.

“Buona Pasqua!” said Filomena, when we came into breakfast this morning.
Her Easter offering lay on the table, two hard-boiled eggs in a little
basket of twisted bread at each plate. Soon after, Pompilia brought her
inevitable _regalo_, a pair of lilac tissue paper fans (she has a
relative who works in the paper factory). As I passed the door
Pompilia’s annual basket of flowers, sent by her cousins every Easter,
was brought in. Ignazio, the gardener, met us on the terrace with a pot
of the biggest violets I have ever seen.

“Only yourself, Signora, and the Princess Doria, in all Rome, have these
magnificent violets, the last novelty from Londra. The Prince has just
introduced them. His gardener is my friend; _così_ I am able to offer
this _bel’ vasino di fiori_!”

A little later, Lorenzo, Villegas’ factotum, arrived with a basket of
lemons from the Villino garden, covered with their own glossy green
leaves and intoxicating blossoms; the petals are thick, pink outside,
white inside, like orange flowers, only larger, and with a less cloying
perfume.

We were up on the terrace in time to see the Host carried through the
street; that was not allowed when we first came to live in the Borgo
Nuovo. Little by little the old picturesque ceremonies of the Church are
creeping back. It is a pretty sight. First march lovely little girls in
white, scattering flowers; then come acolytes, deacons, young clerics--I
am hazy about their titles--swinging censers, carrying the crucifix and
banner; the arch-priest bearing the Sacrament in a golden monstrance,
over which he holds protectingly the sides of his long, stiff,
embroidered vestment, above his head a white and gold _baldacchino_
supported by four young priests. The whole procession, children,
acolytes, priests, attendant women in black veils, went singing across
the piazza of St. Peter’s and down our street under a rain of pink and
green disks of tissue paper thrown from the windows in lieu of flowers.
Across the street Giuseppe, the baker, in white cap and drawers, naked
to the waist, stood at his shop door cooling his heated body. Behind him
in the dark shop as the boy opened the oven door and fed the flame with
armfuls of brushwood, we caught the roar and blaze of fagots in a fiery
cavern.

Giuseppe, a radical (the _parroco_ says a Freemason, that means sure
damnation) stood at his door as the procession passed and nodded to his
little girl, the prettiest of the attendant cherubim, dropping rosebuds.
It is pleasant to see one’s daughter chosen before others, and religion
is an excellent thing in woman, according to Giuseppe’s philosophy. The
crisp, appetizing smell of his hot bread suggested luncheon, which, in
honor of the _festa_, was served on the terrace. The atmosphere has been
ecstatically clear and golden all day, the view sublime, snow-clad peaks
in the distance, the foreground purple, hazy, delicious. The bells of
St. Peter’s (silent since Holy Thursday) have made constant music in the
air. A fine day, with a trifle too much breeze for dignity; it blows the
girls’ curls and draperies, even the scant skirts of the young priest
pacing back and forth on the monastery terrace across the way, breviary
in hand. He always ignores our presence, looks through us as if we were
made of glass; but I catch him gazing with longing eyes at our roses and
lilies that nod and gossip behind their screen of ivy; at the passion
flowers and honeysuckles, haunts of the bee and butterfly. He knows as
well as we do every stage of our roof garden’s history since that day
six years ago when we potted the pink ivy geranium and the white
carnation from the Campo di Fiori, the beginning of this earthly
paradise. We have had a great deal of rain lately, which has been good
for the yellow and orange-colored lichens that enamel the tiled roofs
all about us, and alas! very good for slugs and snails. As to wall
flowers, they simply ramp from every crack and cranny of the gorgeous
_cinque cento_ cornice, with its sharp-cut egg and dart (symbols of life
and death), fragments of which still cling to the inner walls of our
courtyard. The wild flowers run riot over the Corridojo di Castello, the
quaint old fortified passage leading from the Vatican to the Castel
Sant’ Angelo. The Corridojo, built of tufa stone, is two stories high;
the upper story is open like a loggia, the lower closed, with little
slits to let in the light. Just behind our Palazzo the Corridojo
crosses a back street by an enchanting arch, with the arms of the Pope
who built or restored it carved on a stone escutcheon. In the old days
the passage was used in time of danger as an escape from the Vatican to
the fortress of Sant’ Angelo; the Pope himself always kept the keys,
according to Patsy, who dropped in for tea and _maritozzi_ and gave us a
discourse on the subject.

“Who keeps the keys now?” I asked.

“_Chi lo sa?_ Since 1870 the Corridojo has been walled up. I once got a
peep into it. ’T is going to wrack and ruin, which is a shame and
disgrace.”

“Whose fault is it?”

“_Chi lo sa?_ Lay it to the municipality,--they deserve a few extra
curses thrown in for luck, on account of the artificial rockwork with
which they are defacing the Pincio and the Janiculum.”

“Perhaps the Corridojo is no-man’s-land, now that the Vatican belongs to
the Pope and the fortress to the King?”

“_Chi lo sa?_” said Patsy again. “When the Italians came to Rome they
meant to leave the Borgo under the temporal control of the papacy.
Consequently at the first plebiscite (October 2, 1870) no urn was
provided for the Borgo’s vote. You don’t suppose a fellow like that,” he
pointed to the baker, “would let such a little thing keep him out of
United Italy? The first returns of the day were brought in from this,
the fourteenth, _rione_ (ward), by two strapping fellows, who marched up
to the Capitol carrying between them a big urn with the votes from the
Borgo. I have heard that your friend the baker’s father was one of
them.”

“And this morning that man’s granddaughter walked in the procession of
the Sacrament!”

“For the matter of that, here comes Prince Nero’s grandson wearing the
King’s uniform. Both Blacks and Whites, _Dio grazie_, are fast fading
into Grays.”

Beppino, very stiff in his military togs, was shown up on the terrace by
Nena the shabby, who always manages to open the door to fashionable
visitors.

“How do you like your service, Beppino? Your uniform is very becoming,”
I began.

“I don’t like it at all! Fancy being obliged to clean one’s own horse,
to polish one’s own boots--it’s not to be endured!”

It has to be endured; and, moreover, Beppino is enormously improved by
his six months’ endurance of the obligatory military service. Those
fiery brown eyes of his have grown serious.

“Is it true that you voted at the last election?” asked Patsy.

“It is true,” said Beppino.

“How did your grandfather take it?” Patsy persisted.

“I asked the Prince’s leave,” Beppino replied. “He said that for thirty
years he had obeyed the Pope and abstained from voting, that he was too
old to change his politics, but that I was free to do as I liked.”

“How do you account for such an extraordinary change of heart?”

“It’s all the Queen’s doing; she is so good; she is so clever. We
Italians owe more to her than to any one alive to-day!”

Beppino is the son of the son of one of the stoutest pillars of the
Church.

“_Avanti la caccia_ (On with the chase)!” Patsy and I had been snail
hunting when Beppino came up.

“Here is a sharp stick; if you run it round under the edge of the
flower-pot you will get them quicker. Snail, I condemn you to the
parabolic death!” Beppino threw a large fat snail out over the terrace
wall. “That’s the easiest way; it spares our feelings and gives the
snail a chance for his life. He disappears in a parabolic curve; he may
fall upon a passing load of hay and be carried away to batten upon other
rose-leaves.”

Suddenly, like thunder out of a clear sky, there appeared upon the
peaceful terrace the _parroco_, with two black-a-vised French priests,
preceded and announced by Nena. The _parroco_ apologized; he said the
gentlemen were anxious to see our view. The elder Frenchman never looked
at the view at all, but examined the walls of the palace in a way I did
not like. The _parroco_ is always a welcome, if scarcely an easy guest.
I hated his friends; they glanced with so indifferent an eye at the
flowers and seemed so much more interested in the chimneys that J. and
Lorenzo had cleverly contrived to keep me warm. When at last the three
black figures disappeared down the terrace stairs, we other three drew a
long breath.

“Good riddance,” said Patsy.

“You have not seen the last of their cassocks nor them,” said Beppino
(he had an English nurse and governess, and speaks rather better English
than most people). “I believe they mean to buy the palazzo over your
heads. When will your lease be up?”

“In September; but we have the right to renew.”

“No Roman lease holds in case of sale,” said Beppino. “You will find
that clause in your contract. You will see I am right. Some time ago
_Sua Santita_ requested such religious orders as had no house in Rome to
establish one here. During the _Anno Santo_ many have acted on the hint
and bought property in Rome. I heard my grandfather say there were some
French monks looking out for a place near the Vatican. This is just the
sort of thing that would suit them.”

Was not that a thunder clap? Characteristic too that Beppino, the astute
Roman, should first suspect it. When J. came home from the studio and
heard of the priests’ visit, he said: “Beppino is right; the Palazzo
Rusticucci will be transformed into a monastery. They have already
turned Mr. Vedder out of his studio after twenty years; we shall be the
next to go.”

I can’t and won’t believe that this may be our last Easter here. Just
as terrace and house have grown to fit us like soul and body, to be
turned out into the bare, ugly world of hotels,--impossible!

The other day when I was at the studio J. told me that in consequence of
the disappearance of ten francs he had finally decided to part with
Pietro. He has often arrived at this decision before, but the creature,
with a sort of uncanny second sight, always disarms him just in time by
some act of faithfulness, some pretty attention; for Pietro is one of
those Italians with a real genius for service. I happened to be at the
studio when he applied to J. for the place and overheard their
conversation.

“Signorino,” Pietro began, “you are my unique hope; do not abandon me,
the poor _disgraziato_ you have befriended so long: I regard you as my
father.” (Pietro is at least twenty years older than J.)

“Where have you been all this time?” J. asked.

“Signorino, it is necessary for me to tell you the truth, or some
unsympathetic person might do so: I have been in prison, though I am
quite innocent.”

“What were you charged with?”

“It was that affair with Fagiolo the model; you perhaps remember.”

“The time you bit Fagiolo in the leg and gave him such a _coltellata_
(stab) that he had to be sent to San Giacomo (the hospital)? I
remember.”

“_La storia era molto esaggerata, però non potevo mai vedere quell’uomo_
(The story was much exaggerated, but I never could bear the sight of
that man).”

J. remembered the affair, and thought Pietro had been rather hardly
dealt with.

“Since I was discharged it is impossible to find employment; nobody
wants a man, however innocent, who has been in prison.”

“Where is your wife?”

“_Aimé!_ was there ever so unfortunate a man? Zenobia, who, as you know,
is a good seamstress and my sole means of support, broke her leg
yesterday; this morning they carried her to the hospital of the Santo
Spirito.”

J. engaged him on the spot, and Pietro has been in charge of the studio
ever since. He has done very well; the only trouble has been that small
sums of money, cigarettes, and boxes of matches are always
disappearing. J. has spoken several times to Pietro about it. He always
denies having taken anything. J. feels very half hearted about sending
him away; he says that it will be impossible for the man to get another
situation if he dismisses him for stealing. Besides, except for the
pilfering, Pietro is the very man for the place; he takes good care of
the studio, knows all about cleaning palettes and washing brushes, keeps
the courtyard neat and full of such growing things as can exist with the
little sun that penetrates to it, and is devoted to J.’s happy family,
which just now consists of Checca, the lame jackdaw, bought from some
boys in the street who were tormenting her, a pair of ducks, a stray
black dog, and the prettiest maltese kitten you ever saw.

The jackdaw, a most diverting bird, is as curious as a coon. The other
day she flew up on the easel from behind and pecked a hole in the
picture on which J. was working. She put her closed bill through the
canvas, then opened it wide, which made a straight up and down tear, to
which the creature put her ridiculous eye and peeped through to see what
J. was doing.

“Do you really think Pietro is the thief?” I asked. “It would be too
suicidal in him to throw away his last chance!”

“Just what Pietro says,” answered J., “but who else can it be? There is
a Yale lock to the door with two keys; I keep one, Pietro the other.”

While we were talking about him, Pietro came in to move an old stove
which had stood in the corner of the studio all winter without being
lighted. J. is sending it with other household stuff to the auction
room. As Pietro moved the stove its door swung open and out rolled a
quantity of cigarettes, matches, silver and copper coin, paint rags,
orange peel, and among the rubbish a brand new ten-franc note.

“Caw, Caw!” screamed Checca, flapping across the floor and scolding at
Pietro.

“_Ah! Madonna dei setti dolori!_” Pietro, swearing horribly, fell upon
his knees, clasped his hands, invoked every holy thing he knew.

“_Santa Maria, eccomi vindicato! Ah ladrone! Ah birborne_ (Behold me
vindicated. O thief! O villain)!”

“Caw, Caw!” screamed Checca, pecking at Pietro’s legs. He was at first
ready to wring her neck; then he grew lachrymose and tender.

“_Ah! Ah! Pietro sfortunato! Guardi, Signora mia_, was I not born
unlucky? First I am sent to prison on the false oath of a rascally man.
_Adesso, anche la gazza m’inganna, mi perseguita_, (Now even the jackdaw
deceives me, persecutes me)!”

Plumped down on his knees there in the middle of the studio, poor Pietro
began to cry like a baby. It ended in his getting the ten-franc note as
a _mancia_, and Checca’s being so stuffed with good things that she is
in a state of coma and on the verge of apoplexy. Truth really is
stranger than fiction. I never before had much faith in the Jackdaw of
Rheims.

June 10, 1900.

As we sat at dinner last night a messenger from the Casa Reale was
announced. J. went out to receive him in person. He had brought a letter
from a great personage at court to say that the Queen would come to the
studio the next day to see J.’s decoration for the Boston Public
Library. That was rather short notice for such an honor, but we did all
we could to make the old barrack of a studio fit to receive the dear and
lovely lady. We were up at dawn. Pietro had already turned the hose on
the brick paved floors and stone steps. The first thing in the morning
we were warned by the police that no one, not even our servants, must
know of the visit beforehand, so we gave it out that Lord Curry, the
British Ambassador, was coming to the studio, which was quite true. J.
had called up the Embassy, and Lord Curry had promised, by telephone, to
be on hand.

We telephoned the Signora Villegas asking if she could spare Lorenzo,
who turned up at eleven with, I should think, every flower the Villino
garden contained. The bouquet for the Queen I made myself of flowers
from the terrace, gardenias, passion flowers, and maidenhair fern. We
sent over to the studio from the house the fine old Portuguese leather
armchair in which my mother sat to Villegas for her portraits some rugs,
and the gold screens Isabel and Larz brought us from Japan.

You never saw a more squalid street than the Borgo Sant’ Angelo. I very
much doubt if the Queen had ever entered so queer a door as the little
antique green studio door with the modern Yale lock. The studio is up
two long flights of stairs, with an iron railing, quite like a prison
stair. If we had been given longer notice we could have done more to
make things presentable; but that was a mere detail. The main thing was
that the afternoon was fine, the light perfect. The days here are so
much longer than at home that the hour named, six o’clock, was the very
best in the twenty-four to see the pictures. We had never really
believed that the Queen would come to the studio, though we had heard of
her interest in seeing the work. There is a sort of tradition that the
royal family very rarely come over to the Borgo, out of regard for the
feelings of the Pope. During the day one and another secret service man
in plain clothes arrived in the Borgo on their bicycles, and lounged
about the street corners or in the cafés. At five several _guardie_ in
uniform arrived. We went over to the studio at half-past five in order
to be in time to receive Lord Curry. J. went by the Borgo Nuovo and
stopped at the front of the Palazzo Giraud Torlonia (the studio, you
remember, is in the rear of the palace, with an entrance on the back
street, Borgo Sant’ Angelo) to ask the proud young porter of the
Torlonia to open the studio door, and generally stand by us. The
Haywards, who live on the _piano nobile_, are the swells of the Borgo;
they pay the proud young porter his wages, and they are in close
relation with the Vatican. Fortunately they were out of town and never
knew that we borrowed their porter to open the door to the Queen.

“The _Ambasciatore Inglese_ and other _personnaggi_ of importance are to
visit my studio presently; do me the favor to open the door for them,”
said J.

“_Volontiere, Signore mio, un momento_; I will change my coat and be
with you instantly!”

The nearest way from the front of the Torlonia to the back is by the
Vicolo dell’ Erba, a narrow little alley which runs beside the palace.
We never use it--’t is so evil smelling, badly paved, and generally
poverty stricken--unless we are in a great hurry. J. being pressed for
time naturally took the _vicolo_. He happened to be wearing a red
cravat,--in Italy, especially in Rome, supposed to be the badge of the
anarchists and avoided by the Romans, and, one would fancy, by the
anarchists accordingly. Of course all the _guardie_ of our quarter know
the _pittore Inglese_ by sight, but the extra ones detailed for the day
did not. Hurrying through the _vicolo_, J. ran round the corner into
the Borgo Sant’ Angelo, and into the arms of one of these extraneous
_guardie_, ordered to be on the lookout for suspicious characters. His
eye caught the red cravat.

“_Scusi, Signore_; where might you be going in such a hurry?”

“I am going to No. 125, Borgo Sant’ Angelo.”

“You have business of importance there, or you would not be in so much
haste?”

“Yes; I am late for an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“That is a private matter and one which does not concern----”

At this hectic moment the proud young porter came hurrying along the
_vicolo_, buttoning his gold-laced coat as he ran. He took in the
situation at a glance, and with the exquisite tact of his people went
bail for the _pittore Inglese_ without seeming to do so.

“Is there anything I can do for you in the studio, Signore, before their
excellencies arrive?” he asked.

“You know this gentleman?” demanded the _guardia_ suspiciously.

“Know him! I have known him all my life! It is the gentleman who
occupies the studio in the rear of the palace.”

“A thousand pardons, Signore,” said the _guardia_, with a magnificent
military salute. J. had to thank the porter for not having been detained
as “a suspicious person” during the time of the Queen’s visit to his
studio.

A minute or two before the appointed hour we all went down into the
vestibule. There was an odd hushed feeling in the street: a watering
cart had just passed, the square gray cobble-stones were still wet, the
air moist. Pietro had found time to pull up the weeds and grass from the
pavement (worn into ruts by centuries of cart-wheels) in front of our
door, and to clear away the bits of water-melon rind which the boys of
the Borgo use as roller skates, in a game that I believe is indigenous
to our quarter. Just as the bells of the Castle Sant’ Angelo were
ringing six, we heard the jingling of chains and the sound of tramping
horses. We were all on the sidewalk as the carriage with the scarlet
liveries drew up before the studio. The proud young porter, his hand on
the knob of the studio door, made the most sumptuous bow as the footman
opened the door of the landeau. Lord Curry handed out the Queen,

[Illustration: _Dante_

From a pastel drawing in the Collection of Mrs. David Kimball]

[Illustration: From a Copley Print. Copyright, 1899, by Curtis &
Cameron, Publishers, Boston.]

presented J., then gave her his arm and led her up the dreadful long
stair. Her lady in waiting, the Duchess Massimo, and the gentleman of
the court in attendance, followed, looking aghast and rather scornful at
the queer steps; but the royal lady never flinched; she walked up the
stairway with as gay and light a step as if she were treading the red
carpet of the Quirinale. Once in the studio one lost sight of the royal
personage in the _connoisseur_, the lover and patron of art. It is no
wonder that the artists look upon her as their friend. To her art is one
of the serious concerns of life, one of the matters which it is her duty
as a sovereign, as the mother of her people, to foster by every means in
her power.

She looked at the decoration from every point of view, asked many
questions about its destination. She knew of the Boston Public Library,
and said many pleasant things of it, and of J.’s ceiling for it. She
liked the funny old studio, with its big fireplace, its enormous window,
and explored it with the fresh curiosity of a young girl. She asked what
this and what that picture was, insisted on being shown canvases that
stood with their faces to the wall. J.’s drawing of Dante and the death
mask from which it was made interested her deeply; she is evidently a
student of the divine poet. The portrait of the Duke of Cambridge which
J. made last spring was standing on an easel. She laughed heartily when
she saw it, and said, “It is so exactly like the old man that it makes
me laugh.”

They stayed half an hour. Part of that time the Queen sat in the old
Portuguese leather chair which our own dear mother queen always sat in
when she was with us. As they went away, the Duchess Massimo said to me,
“I assure you the Queen has been much interested and much pleased.”

We all went down to the carriage; the Borgo was one compact mass of
people. We watched the carriage drive away, caught the sweet parting
smile of our lovely visitor, and then went back to the studio to talk it
all over. In a few minutes two of our best friends turned up. They had
come over by chance to have tea at the studio, and had received quite a
sensation at seeing the royal carriage with the scarlet liveries
standing before the shabby old green door and the Borgo crammed with the
Roman populace.

July 16, 1900.

Saturday evening as we sat at dinner another messenger from the Casa
Reale was announced. He brought a letter from the Countess Villamarina,
the Queen’s maid of honor, to J., in which she begged to send him, in
the name of her “august sovereign,” the accompanying jewel for his wife,
in memory of her visit to the studio. The jewel is a medallion of dark
blue enamel, with M., the Queen’s initial, in diamonds, with a royal
crown above it. On the reverse are the arms of Savoy, the red cross on
the white field, the whole surrounded by a hoop of diamonds hanging from
a bar of diamonds, set as a brooch, and very elegant.

J. says that we cannot afford to stay in the Borgo if we remain in Rome,
we must move to a new quarter. Ever since the Queen’s visit, the
_gobbo_, our favorite cabby, has called him Signor Marchese, and expects
a larger _mancia_ than he can afford to give.

XIV

STRAWBERRIES OF NEMI

LAKE OF NEMI, July 8, 1900.

The _fruttajola_ of the Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina, and the waiter of
the Café di Roma are responsible for our coming to Nemi. I like to
linger chaffering in the _fruttajola’s_ shop (at this season it smells
of strawberries and apricots) not only because she has the best fruit in
Rome but because she has three of the prettiest daughters--the youngest
looks as the Fornarina, the baker’s daughter beloved of Raphael, might
have looked. When the _fruttajola_ was young she must have been even
handsomer than her daughters, though their cheeks seem like duplicates
of the peaches and nectarines they handle so daintily; she has an
intensity of expression, a look of power that none of her girls have.

“You tell me these strawberries are from Nemi,” I said; “how is that
possible? For the past month you have sold me strawberries from Nemi,
always from Nemi! All over Rome I see the strawberries of Nemi
advertised. Is it likely now that a little town like Nemi can supply
such a great city as Rome with strawberries all these many weeks?”

You see I remembered what the Tuscan wine grower said to us about the
wine of Chianti. The _fruttajola_ tossed her handsome head. “Signora,
you have but to see Nemi to understand!” she said, laying on the counter
a little blue paper box she had been making and lining with grape leaves
as she talked and which she now filled with purple figs and yellow
_nespole_. That night, wishing to give our servants “an evening off,” we
dined at the Café di Roma. Of course we had the inevitable dishes of
this season, chicken, hunter’s fashion (braised, with green peppers),
salad of tomato and endive, finishing off with strawberries from Nemi,
and of course the cream was too thin. J. asked Leandro, the waiter who
always serves us, if it was not possible to get better cream. He has
often asked the same question before.

“Signore,” said Leandro, “this cream comes from the dairy next door. We
always order the best for you, and this is what they send us. Why do
you not yourself step in and speak to the proprietor? He will take more
pains for you than for me.” Pricked by memories of Jersey cream which
those ravishing strawberries evoked, J. sought the _padrone_ of the
dairy.

“Is it not possible to have thicker cream than that you send to the
restaurant?” he asked. The man looked surprised. “The Signore desires
thicker cream? Why, of course, it is possible to have the cream as thick
as he wishes, only have a moment’s patience.” As he spoke the _padrone_
took up a fine hair sieve, put into it a lump of some soft white stuff
which he mashed with a big spoon into a paste; this he passed through
the sieve, every now and then letting a few drops fall out of the spoon
to show how thick the cream had become.

“Is that thick enough, Signore?” he finally asked.

“Quite thick enough, thank you,” said poor J. grimly. “Will you do me
the favor of telling me what you use to thicken the cream?”

“But surely! Various things are used; the best is this that you see, the
brains of a young calf nicely boiled.”

When J. came back to the restaurant he said that, on the whole, he
preferred his strawberries with wine and sugar, as the Romans eat them.
The waiter pushed a flask hung on a swivel towards him; J. drowned his
plate in a flood of red Genzano. Isn’t it odd that in Roman restaurants
wine is sold by weight? Leandro weighed the flask before putting it on
the table, and again when he took it off after dinner.

In order to make conversation I said, “Leandro, do you know where these
strawberries really come from?”

“Do I know? They are from my own town, it may be from our own land! the
proprietor of this restaurant buys oil, fruit, and wine of my uncle, who
lives at Nemi. I myself have a little property at Nemi. The oil the
Signora had of me came from there. Ah! you should see Nemi, you should
eat the strawberries fresh from the vines.”

That settled it; we had been promising ourselves a little Fourth of July
outing somewhere in the country, so the next day we took the train for
Albano and drove over to Nemi, where we are decently settled at the
Trattoria Desanctis.

Nemi is an enchanting little mediæval town perched high above the edge
of the Lake of Nemi called by the ancients the Mirror of Diana. Sitting
in the terraced garden of the old castle of the Orsini, near our inn,
you look down the steep sides of the crater of an extinct volcano, over
three hundred feet, to the lake, a big sparkling sapphire, three miles
in circumference, lying at the bottom of a green enamelled cup. There is
no soil in the world, the landlord says, quite as rich as this volcanic
soil. Every inch of the land is highly cultivated, and here, _here_ on
the sloping sides of the old volcano grow the wild and the tame
strawberries of Nemi. I trust it is not necessary to tell you that the
wild ones are by far the best. We clambered down a steep path jewelled
with wild flowers to the very edge of Diana’s mirror. I dipped my hand
in the clear cold water. It is hard to realize that where this gemlike
lake now sparkles in the sunlight there was once a pit of fire, that the
sides where the pleasant strawberries grow were once coated with a
velvet bloom of sulphur like the crater of Vesuvius. We turned and
looked up the slope; a breeze ruffled the green leaves and exposed the
vines beneath, laden with myriads of strawberries, red as rubies. As the
_fruttajola_ foretold, I now understand how the little town of Nemi
supplies the big city of Rome with strawberries.

[Illustration: _The Palace of the Orsini at Nemi_

From a photograph]

The lake is more than one hundred feet deep and is drained by an
artificial emissarium--ancient Roman, of course. The peasants say that
the lake has no bottom. As there is a sort of whirlpool in the middle
from the suction of the water into the emissarium, it is considered
unsafe for boating or bathing. There is a story of a mad Englishman who
tried to swim across and was never seen again, his body having been
sucked down into the bowels of the earth--not a bad way of disposing of
it. A few years ago they found the remains of a Roman state barge at the
bottom of the lake. The bronze ornaments and even part of the wooden
walls were intact. The barge was presumably used as a float in some
imperial pageant of old Rome.

At sunset the women and girls who had been busy all day gathering fruit
began to pass by our inn, bearing vast loads of fragrant strawberries on
their heads. The berries are picked into flat wide baskets with handles,
through which a long stick is passed, joining together the ten or twelve
baskets that constitute a load. As each sun-browned wench trudged past,
our eyes were rejoiced with a superb flare of scarlet, and our
noses--ah! nothing in this world has ever tasted so good as the
strawberries of Nemi smell.

Just where the white highroad, following the line of the old crater,
curves and is hidden by a group of dark ilex trees, the women halted
beside the line of gay painted carts waiting to carry the strawberries
to Rome. We discovered the _carretta_ of Leandro’s uncle, a fine affair
painted blue and yellow, with long shafts and a comfortable seat beneath
a red and white striped awning. Oreste, the driver, a shrewd peasant, in
spite of his loutish, grumpy manner, has a certain family resemblance to
his cousin the waiter, but how contact with the world has sharpened
Leandro’s wits, polished his manners! Oreste and Leandro! Don’t you love
the classic names? They linger here in the country and help to bring
back to you Theocritus and the golden age of Magna Grecia.

“At what hour do you start?” J. asked Oreste.

“At ten o’clock.”

“It must be a very long drive; do you not get dreadfully tired? what
time do you reach Rome?”

Oreste answered my remarks in the order they were put.

“The distance is twenty miles; when I am tired I sleep; with luck I
shall reach the gates of Rome by four o’clock in the morning.”

“Who minds the cart while you sleep?”

“Lupetto here;” he patted the dearest little dog on the seat beside him.
Lupetto looks like a young fox, he has the brightest eyes, the smallest
pointed ears, and a soft furry tan coat clipped like a lion’s.

“As long as Lupetto is quiet and I hear this music,” he touched with his
long carter’s whip the string of bells round the horse’s neck, “I doze
in peace. When the bells stop jingling or Lupetto barks I rouse myself
to find out what is the matter.”

“Have you ever been robbed?”

“That sometimes happens with a load of wine, but with fruit, no.
Everybody knows that I never carry money and that I have a good knife!”
he drew the knife from his boot and ran his thumb along the blade,
testing the sharpness of the edge.

The moon, a golden sickle, hung low in the sky, the big soft stars
seemed nearer to the earth than usual. Lupetto gave an impatient little
bark, the horse stirred uneasily, jingling his bells. The last basket of
strawberries had been loaded on the cart; it was clearly time to be
off. Oreste gathered up his reins and whistled to his horse.

“_Felice notte_ (A happy night).” He grunted the pretty greeting to us
over his shoulder awkwardly. After watching Oreste with his two best
friends, his horse and his dog, start on the long night journey to Rome,
we went back to the castle garden, where our landlord treated us to
anecdotes touching that interesting family, the Orsini.

Everything comes to him who knows how to wait! Ever since we first went
to live at the Palazzo Rusticucci I have longed to climb to the top of
Monte Cavo, the highest of the Alban hills. From our terrace you can see
the front of the old Passionist monastery on its summit glinting white
in the sun. Yesterday the long waiting came to an end and I have seen my
Carcassonne! We reached the summit after a two hours’ walk up the old
Via Triumphalis--the steep paved way along which the Roman generals once
passed to celebrate the military triumphs at the temple of Jupiter
Latiaris, which stood at the top of Monte Cavo. It is a wonderful road;
in some places the old basalt pavement is as good as on the day when it
was laid, some time “before the year one”! Truly a glorious walk, with
sudden splendid vistas over plain and mountains, and cool odorous groves
where we found the wild heartsease, sensitive ethereal flowers, poor
relations of our fat, stall-fed purple and gold terrace pansies. A good
bath of nature, such as we had climbing the flanks of Monte Cavo, makes
man and all his works--even the higher cultivation of flowers--seem a
vain thing. We passed the vast crater of another extinct volcano called
the Camp of Hannibal, who according to local tradition once bivouacked
here. In a few days the garrison will come from Rome for its annual
summer camping out, and Beppino, our fascinating young friend with the
burning brown eyes, will pitch his tent possibly on the very spot where
Hannibal slept.

The temple of Jupiter is gone; its ruins were destroyed by Cardinal
York, one of the last of the Stuarts, in 1777, when he built the
monastery. Was not that trying of him? and so inappropriate too, for
whatever their faults may have been the Stuarts have always been
protectors of the arts. Half of the monastery is now a government
meteorological station, the other half an inn, which concerned us more.
We ordered supper and while waiting for it moused about in the old
garden till we found the little that remains of the temple, a few
fragments of the foundation and some pieces of marble roughly built into
the garden wall. “_Sic transit gloria mundi_,” the temple is gone, the
monastery too; meanwhile remain eggs in black butter for hungry
travellers, and the imperishable beauty of the view. The wise old monks
always chose the most magnificent sites for their monasteries. Good air
and a fine outlook were what they held to be essential; they found the
ideal site, and somehow screwed up the real to fit it. Do you know a
better rule for building one’s house? I do not.

How do you suppose it felt after having been grilled alive on the stones
of Rome for a month, to borrow a shawl from the landlady, in order to
sit out after sunset and enjoy the wonderful prospect? Below, at the
foot of Monte Cavo, lay the lakes of Albano and Nemi, darkly blue where
they were not silver, and far, far off, a pale blue bubble on the
horizon, gleamed the dome of St. Peter’s. If we could have borrowed a
spyglass from the meteorological bureau, I am sure we could have made
out the white columns of our terrace in the shadow of the great dome.
When it grew too cold to sit out, the landlady showed us to a pair of
tiny stone cells. In the watches of the night I knocked on the thick
wall that separated us, “for company,” as some lonely Passionist monk
may have rapped a greeting to a brother in the dark winter nights of
long ago. In spite of the odor of sanctity (stronger here than I have
ever known it), hardness of bed, flabbiness of pillow, in spite of the
keen chill before dawn, that one cool night in the old Passionist
monastery will remain a delicious memory when the hot pavements of a
Roman July are forgotten!

Early the next morning we made the descent by a short cut, a steep path
that brought us out on the highway not far from Nemi.

Near the town we overtook Oreste on his way back from Rome. He had drawn
up his cart in an olive grove and was examining the fruit on the trees.
Lupetto, whose turn it was to sleep, lay snugly curled up on the seat.
We sat down to rest in the pleasant shade of the gray green leaves.
There are twelve aged olive trees in the grove, and another larger and
more picturesque than the rest originally belonging to the same group,
standing alone, on the other side of the white high road. The trunk of
this old tree is almost hollow, a mere shell of shaggy bark. The knotted
roots reach out an amazing distance from the stem before they grip the
earth. The twisted trunk and limbs look like a tortured human being with
uplifted arms, and suggest the men turned to trees of the Inferno.

“This is the finest olive tree I have seen in Italy,” J. said. Oreste
gloomily assented.

“It is a noble tree worth any three of the others. See how many olives
it has. Leandro will come soon to gather them.”

“Your cousin, Leandro?”

“Yes; this is his tree. My grandfather of blessed memory who owned these
thirteen trees had thirteen children. When he died he left one olive
tree to each child. The mother of Leandro was his favorite daughter,
there is no denying that, and to her he left this tree, though by good
rights it should have come to the eldest son, my father. They quarrelled
at the time, but my uncle the priest patched things up between them, he
said it was a disgrace for kindred to quarrel over an inheritance. All
very well for him to preach,--priests are obliged to, that is how they
earn their living. I was a mere child, or the matter would not have
been so easily settled, I can tell you. It is too late now; this famous
tree is Leandro’s, I must content myself with that blighted one yonder,
plainly the poorest of the lot.”

“Your tree has not been so well cared for as the others,” J. said. “Look
how wisely these branches have been pruned. The sun reaches every part.”
The branches in the middle of the big olive had been neatly cut away
leaving an open space the shape of a cup in the centre.

“There may be something in what you say,” grumbled Oreste, “indeed I
have little time to care for my property. I must always be on the road,
now with wine, now with olives, now with strawberries. Besides, I have
not Leandro’s opportunities; he sells to the strangers!”

“We will try your oil; bring the first you make to the Palazzo
Rusticucci.” On this we parted. We shall see Oreste in Rome before long
and ascertain if the oil from his tree is as good as that of the famous
old patriarch tree which we have had in other years from Leandro. To
know the vines that bear your grapes and the trees that give your olives
and oil is the next best thing to owning them, don’t you think?

The most interesting person we have met in Nemi is an old soldier of
Garibaldi’s. We were watching the sunset from the terrace of the inn one
evening, when we fell into talk with him. He is a grave, thoughtful man;
stern of expression, slow of speech, not quite like any other Italian I
have ever known. He walks with a cane, and stoops badly; I am sure if he
could stand upright he would measure six feet two inches in height. His
face is a network of wrinkles, he has an ugly red scar across one cheek.

The conversation beginning with the weather soon changed to politics. At
first he spoke in English, of which he has a small stock of words.
Something was said about the Pope and the temporal power. He bristled
all over, growing red as a turkey cock as he said,--

“The Popay as a Popay, very welley; the Popay as a Kingay, not at
alley!”

After this he relapsed into Italian and would not be induced to speak
more English. Cruel, was it not? He is gloomy enough about the present
political situation; pessimistic about the future.

He spoke with slow cold anger of a recent act of the Italian parliament,
which he cannot forgive.

“They to pass a vote of censure on Francesco Crispi! The whole lot of
them are not worth one finger of his hand!” he said.

“Everybody knows that it was the result of a political cabal against
Crispi.”

“No, not everybody; some are wholly ignorant and others forget! We who
were with him in Sicily, where he was as the right hand of Garibaldi,
know the man for what he is. He has been insulted, and his friends will
be slow to forget the insult.”

“You also were in Sicily with Garibaldi?”

“I am one of the Thousand.”

It was as if he had said “I am one of the Three Hundred of Thermopylæ,”
or the “Six Hundred of Balaclava!” It was electrifying to find oneself
in the company of one of those “few and good men” who sailed with
Garibaldi from Quarto, on the 5th of May, 1860, landed six days later at
Marsala under the protection of the British gunboats Intrepid and Argus,
made the glorious march to Palermo, and freed Sicily and Naples from the
hateful yoke of the Bourbons.

“I have heard that you of the Thousand loved your chief as if he had
been your father; is this true?”

“Our acts, not merely our words, proved it to be true. We would have
died for him to the last man. Even the women and priests wanted to take
up arms and follow Garibaldi. You know the story of the nuns? A whole
convent of nuns, from the old mother abbess to the youngest novice, gave
him the kiss of peace, they would not be denied!” He grew visibly
younger as he talked, there was fire in the man; it took but the breath
of our sympathy to blow the embers to a flame.

“Was that scar on your cheek made by an Austrian or a French bayonet?”
He rubbed the old wound with a stiff hand smiling grimly to himself. “By
neither--worse yet! At Calatafini, when the royal troops--they were
Neapolitans--had exhausted their cartridges, they threw stones at us.
Have you not heard what Garibaldi said of that action? ‘The old
misfortune, a fight between Italians, but it proves to me what can be
done with this family united.’ One day while the chief was watering his
horse at a spring a Franciscan friar suddenly appeared among us. Some of
the men tried to arrest him, but he forced his way to the chiefs side,
threw himself on his knees, and begged to be taken along with us. There
were some who believed him an enemy in disguise, but the man, his name
was Fra Pantaleo, did good service and proved true as steel!”

As long as the talk is of the old time our ancient soldier is a hero;
when it touches to-day he degenerates into a grumbler. He seems less
dissatisfied with the army than with most things modern. “My grandson is
serving his four years. Where do you suppose his regiment is quartered?
In Milan; that is as it should be, the North and the South must know
each other. It is well to send the men of Sicily to Piedmont and the
Piedmontese to Sicily. In this manner they may learn that they are
before all things Italians.”

The veterans who fought for the Unification of Italy are treated very
much as we treat the veterans who fought for the preservation of our
Union; they are scolded, laughed at, loved, and forgiven many things
that would be unpardonable in others. On national holidays the old
Garibaldians turn out in their red shirts, white kerchiefs, and peaked
caps. They are fewer now, their blouses have faded to a softer red than
when I first saw them in the year 1878, mustered to meet Garibaldi,
already mortally ill, when he came up from rocky Caprera to Rome for
the funeral of Victor Emanuel, the man he had made King of Italy. I
remember it as if it had all happened yesterday. We were in the square
outside the railroad station when he arrived. The Piazza di Termini was
packed with silent people waiting patiently hour after hour. At last we
heard the whistle of an engine; the crowd was shaken by a murmur,
“Garibaldi has come!”

A landeau was driven across the piazza at a footpace, Garibaldi lay
across the carriage, his head raised on a pillow. He wore the classic
gray felt hat and the red blouse. At first his eyes were closed as if he
were in pain. His face reminded one that God made man in His own image.
The features were fine and firm, the hair and beard were a rich silver,
the complexion white and rose, like a child’s. He was always described
as “bronzed”; the delicacy came from his long illness. Once he opened
his eyes, those who stood near caught an eagle’s glance. A tall woman
lifted her child high over her head, whispering to it, “Never, never,
never forget that thou hast seen the face of Garibaldi.” There was no
applause; many women, some men were weeping. As the carriage passed, the
guard of honor, his old companions in arms, closed around it. F., who
was near us in the crowd, was singing under his breath the words of the
old Carbonari song,

“_Zitto! silenzio, chi passa la ronda? evviva la republica, evviva
liberta_ (Hush, silence! Who passes the patrol? Long live the republic,
and long live liberty)!”

I wonder if F. remembers! He is a Pope’s man now and denies the virtue
of republics.

I described this scene to our old soldier; his bloodshot eyes grew
redder yet as he said gruffly,--

“I too was there!”

To-morrow we go back to Rome. We have ordered a basket of strawberries
to take with us. I have written to the _gobbo_ to meet us at the
station; as we pass the _fruttajola’s_ shop I shall stop and tell her
that I now understand all about the strawberries of Nemi.

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, July 14, 1900.

This summer I am again trying the Roman method of supineness; I eat very
little, sleep a great deal, and keep mostly indoors. Last year I
exhausted myself with bicycling and other violent exercise. The English
and German residents recommend this energetic course, but I find that
the Romans are right. The terrace is too lovely, ablaze with marigolds,
cannas, cockscombs, balsams, oleanders, and portulacas. Our only failure
has been the dahlias, which all died. The vines are all doing famously;
the red honeysuckle which J. dug up (in the very face of the white bull)
at the Villa Madama, has grown to an astonishing size. Our large
passion-flower vine covered half the terrace pergola; it had out-grown
the largest flower-pot that is made, so to save its life J. gave it to
Signor Boni for the Roman forum. Four men carried it downstairs. It was
tragic to see the beautiful branches broken and trailing as they put it
in a cart and drove it away.

This is the beginning of the end! Beppino was right, the Palazzo
Rusticucci is sold to a brotherhood of French monks, and we must deliver
up the apartment and the terrace to them on the first day of September.
Many of our beloved plants will be bought by friends, others we shall
give away. The honeysuckles and some of the roses follow the
passion-flower to the forum; others go to the garden of the American
School of Archæology, where the dear Nortons will care for them, and
some to the Spanish Academy, where the Signora Villegas will have an eye
to them.

Camphoring goes on to-day; the general wretchedness of “things in the
saddle” is in the air. How stupidly we complicate life by acquiring
fleeces of Miletus and other perishable objects. How to dispose of the
accumulations of all these years? Diogenes had the right of it. In
future a tub and the sunlight will suffice me.

This afternoon as we were sitting comfortably together in the big old
studio (the coolest place in Rome) enjoying our tea, Signor Boni threw a
bombshell into our camp.

“I notice,” he said, “that those cracks in the wall have widened
perceptibly since I was last here.”

The studio is forty feet high, sixty feet long. Among the jocose
charcoal sketches scrawled on the walls certain evil-looking cracks
zigzag from the high-pitched wooden roof to the red brick pavement. When
we first came they were no more than mere cracks in the whitewash; now
they gape wide enough to hold my finger. As we were examining the cracks
we all started at a sound like the snapping of a pistol over our heads.

“What was that noise?” I cried.

“Only the creaking of the ceiling beams, it happens every now and
again,” said J.

“Before we restored the Ducal Palace in Venice, and saved it from
tumbling down, the same thing went on,” said Signor Boni; “but, _amici
miei_, do you not see what all this means?”

“It means that this old barrack is going to pieces,” said J.; “some day
they will either have to shore it up or tear it down.”

“Listen,” said the Venetian, impressively. “Last Sunday morning the
Palazzo Piombino, in the Via della Scrofa, not half a mile from here,
fell in a heap of ruins, all in a second, with no more warning than you
have had. If it had not been _festa_, and a fine day, there would have
been a great loss of life. As it was the people were all out gadding
about the town.”

Pietro, who had been listening, now chimed in. “_Scuse Signore_, there
was the cook, a friend of mine, who was obliged to remain at home in
order to freeze the ice cream,--thirsty work on a hot day. _Magari_,
that cook’s thirst saved his life. He had just climbed through the
grating into the wine cellar to get a _fiaschetta_ of the wine of
Orvieto, when piff, paff, pifferty! down came the house crashing about
his ears. The wine cellar had a vaulted stone roof so strong that it
resisted all the bricks, mortar, and rubbish that fell upon it. They
heard that cook shrieking like a small devil, and dug him out; the flask
of Orvieto was still in his hand, though he had not drunk a drop; he
believed that the catastrophe was a judgment upon him for taking the
wine.”

“The Palazzo Rusticucci to be sold over our heads, the studio
threatening to fall down upon them--our Roman world is crumbling about
us!” I cried.

To which Pietro’s “What are you going to do about it?” was cold
comfort.

XV

THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING!

PALAZZO RUSTICUCCI, ROME, July 29, 1900.

I was awakened at six o’clock this morning by a loud knocking and the
shrill voices of my maids calling to me. Hurrying out to the hall I
found the three pale, shivering women huddled together near our door.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

Old Nena could only lift her withered hands to heaven and cry aloud to
the Madonna. Filomena stood staring dully, saying over and over
again,----

“Murdered, murdered, murdered!”

Pompilia the Tuscan seemed less distraught than the others.

“Tell me quickly what has happened?” I said to her.

“They have killed our King!” wailed Pompilia.

“It is true,” Filomena sobbed; “I heard it when I went to mass.”

We dressed immediately and went out into the street, to find that it was
only too true. Giuseppe the baker standing at his shop door, white as
his linen clothes, read aloud the dreadful news from his morning paper.
In the dark shop behind, his boy fed the crackling fire with brushwood
as if nothing out of the common had happened. The loaves were ready for
the oven; it was his business to keep up the fire.

“Last night, at half-past ten o’clock, as the King was getting into his
carriage at Monza, he was shot and almost instantly killed. As he fell,
those nearest caught him in their arms imploring him to say if he were
seriously hurt. His Majesty answered, _Non è niente_ (It is nothing).’
These were his last words, he died almost immediately after.”

Ignazio our gardener who had just come up, a damp newspaper crumpled in
his hand, echoed the words:

“It is nothing! It is nothing! Was not that like him? Ah! he was a brave
man.”

“The assassin was with difficulty saved from the mob;” Giuseppe
continued to read.

“Why _did_ they save him?” interrupted Ignazio. “They should have let
the people tear the wretch to pieces, and that would have been too good
for him!”