“Go on home to your wife,” he said, in a low voice that was the saddest I ever heard. “I don't bear you any ill-will in the world. Nobody's going to give you away.”
THE ALIENS
Pietro Tobigili, that gay young chestnut vender—he of the radiant smiles—gave forth, in his warm tenor, his own interpretation of “Ach du lieber Augustine,” whenever Bertha, rosy waitress in the little German restaurant, showed her face at the door. For a month it had been a courtship; and the merchant sang often:
“Ahaha, du libra Ogostine,
Ogostine, Ogostine!
Ahaha, du libra Ogostine,
Nees coma ross.”
The acquaintance, begun by the song and Pietro's wonderful laugh, had grown tender. The chestnut vender had a way with him; he looked like the “Neapolitan Fisher Lad” of the chromos, and you could have fancied him of two centuries ago, putting a rose in his hair; even as it was, he had the ear-rings. But the smile of him it was that won Bertha, when she came to work in the little restaurant. It was a smile that put the world at its ease; it proclaimed the coming of morning over the meadows, and, taking every bystander into an April friendship, ran on suddenly into a laugh that was like silver, and like a strange puppy's claiming you for the lost master.
So it befell that Bertha was fascinated; that, blushing, she laughed back to him, and was nothing offended when, at his first sight of her, he rippled out at once into “Ahaha, du libra Ogostine.”
Within two weeks he was closing his business (no intricate matter) every evening, to walk home with her, through the September moonlight. Then extraordinary things happened to the English language.
“I ain'd nefer can like no foreigner!” she often joked back to a question of his. “Nefer, nefer! you t'ink I'm takin' up mit a hant-orkan maan, Mister Toby?”
Whereupon he would carol out the tender taunt, “Ahaha, du libra Ogostine!”