"If it doesn't rain," said Lorna, eyeing the sky suspiciously.
"Oh, don't be a wet blanket! It's no use courting trouble, honey, as Willy Shakespeare says somewhere. Oh, well, if it wasn't Willy Shakespeare it was somebody else who said it, and it's just as true anyway. Take your umbrella and wait till the rain comes down before you grumble. I've got an exeat and I didn't expect it, and I'm going off my head a little. That's all! Don't worry yourselves about me. I'm sane at the bottom."
With Peachy and Delia prancing about and hardly able to regulate their satisfaction the expedition promised to be a lively one, though the harum-scarum pair calmed down in the presence of Miss Bickford, and assumed a deportment of due decorum. The favored twelve were half seniors and half Transition, the remaining pair of the latter consisting of Bertha Ford and Mabel Hughes. The Camellia Buds exchanged eloquent glances at the sight of their arch-enemies, but wisely forbore to make any provocative remarks; Delia indeed even murmured something pleasant about the excursion to which Bertha grunted a reply, so the party started off in apparent harmony.
Antonio, with his big key, unlocked the great gate, they filed through into the eucalyptus-shaded road, and in ten minutes they had left the quiet school behind them, and were down in the gay little town of Fossato. It was new and wonderful to Irene. The wide main street with its intense brilliant sunshine contrasting with the deep shade of the narrow side streets, the open shop-fronts with their displays of picturesque wares, the stalls of fruit and vegetables sold by quaint country vendors, the balconies full of flowers, the kindly, dark-eyed, smiling people, the pretty peasant children clattering about in heelless wooden shoes, the brightly painted carts and the horses decorated with flowers and feathers as if for a perpetual May Day, all made up a scene that was more like a portion of a play than a piece of real life, and made her almost able to imagine herself upon the stage of a theater. They had reached a great square, where leafless trees were covered with a beautiful purple blossom, something like mezereon. From a marble fountain bareheaded women, with exquisitely arranged dark tresses and bright handkerchiefs folded shawl-wise round their shoulders, were drawing water in brass pitchers, and chattering the soft southern dialect with the pretty tuneful Neapolitan voices that speak like singing and sing like opera. An equestrian statue of Garibaldi stood on a pedestal in the midst of a flowerbed of gay geraniums, and below, in the shadow, a military officer, with a gorgeous pale blue cloak draped over one shoulder, was talking to two Italian soldiers whose plumed hats were adorned with shining cocks' feathers.
Miss Bickford, in the van of the Villa Camellia queue, strode on, taking no notice, beyond a firm shake of the head, of the various interruptions that met her path—the drivers who offered their carriages for hire, the smiling women who thrust forward baskets of oranges for sale, the beguiling children who held out little brown hands and begged for soldi (halfpennies), and the post-card vendors who spread out sets of colored views of the neighborhood. It was a good thing that Miss Parr was at the rear of the procession to keep order, or the girls would have succumbed to some of these temptations and have broken rank, an unpardonable offense in the eyes of the school authorities, who wished to keep up the prestige of their establishment in the estimation of the town, and to emulate the convent school on the hill, whose pupils marched along the high street as demurely as young nuns.
Turning out of the piazza they walked alongside a deep natural gorge which divided Fossato from the open country. This immense ravine was a fearsome place, with a sheer descent of many hundreds of feet; its jagged rocks were clothed with bushes and creepers, and clefts and the openings of caves could be seen amongst the greenery. The girls leaned on the low wall and shuddered as they gazed down the precipice.
"Antonio and Dominica say that dwarfs live in the caves down there," remarked Peachy. "Half the people in the town believe in them, but they're too afraid to go and see because the dwarfs have 'the evil eye,' and would bring them bad luck."
"What superstitious nonsense!" laughed Rachel. "How can they make up such stuff?"
"Not altogether such nonsense as you think," corrected Miss Bickford, who was a student of archæology; "indeed I find it intensely interesting. It's a case of survival of tradition. A few thousand years ago no doubt a race of little short dark Stone Age men actually lived in those caves, and took good care to avenge themselves on any of the taller, stronger tribes who interfered with them and tried to push them out of their territory. The remembrance of them would be handed down long after they had become extinct, and, of course their doings were exaggerated, and their cunning tricks were set down to magic. Just as the prehistoric monsters lingered as dragons and firedrakes, so the small early inhabitants of Europe have passed into dwarfs and brownies and pixies. If anybody cared to dig in those caves I dare say flint weapons might be found. It's a chance for the local antiquarian society if they'd only take it."
Leaving the gorge the party turned up a steep and very narrow alley between walls nine or ten feet high. At the tops of these walls were raised gardens planted with orange and lemon trees, whose fruit, in all stages of green, gold, and yellow, overshadowed the path. Across some of them were erected shelters of reeds or plaited grass, to prevent too quick ripening, but in some of the orchards the crop was ready, and workers were busy with ladders and baskets gathering their early harvests. It was a picturesque route, for the sides of the deep walls were covered with beautiful maidenhair ferns, and over the tops hung geraniums or clumps of white iris or purple stocks or clusters of little red roses. Here and there, at a corner, was a wayside shrine with a faded picture of the Madonna, and a quaint brass lamp in front, and perhaps some flowers laid there by loving hands; dark-eyed smiling little children were playing about and giving each other rides in home-made hand-carts, and at one point the girls stood aside to let pass a donkey so loaded with tiny bamboo trees that it looked a mere moving mass of green.