“Which reminds me that in the Oberpfalz or Upper Palatinate maidens were wont to go to a well by moonlight, and if on looking therein they saw their own faces, they believed
that they would soon be happily married. But if a cloud darkened the moon and they saw nothing, then they would die old maids. But luckiest of all was it if they fancied they saw a man’s face, for this would be the future husband himself.
“Now it befell that a certain youth near Heidelberg fell into a well, or put himself there, when a certain maid whom he loved, came and looked in, and believing that she saw the face of her destined spouse, went away in full faith that the fairy of the well had taken his form, and so she married him. Which, if it be not true, is ben trovato.
“Truth is always represented, be it remembered, as holding a mirror.
“And note also that the hand-mirror and the well were strangely connected in ancient times, as appears by Pausanias, who states that before a certain temple of Ceres hung a speculum, which, after it had been immersed in a neighbouring well or spring, showed invalids by reflection whether they would live or die. And with all this, the holding a mirror to the mouth of an insensible person to tell whether the breath was still in the body, seemed also to make it an indicator of life.”
“Thus in life all things do pass,
As it were, in magic glass.”
THE STORY OF THE VIA DELLE SERVE SMARRITE
“We all do know the usual way
In which our handmaids go astray,
But in this tale the situation
Has a peculiar variation;
How an old wizard—strange occurrence!
Deluded all the girls in Florence,
(It needs no magic now to do it),
And how the maidens made him rue it,
For having seized on him and stripped him,
They tied him up and soundly whipped him.”
The author of “The Cities of Central Italy,” speaking of Siena, says that “In its heart, where its different hill-promontories unite, is the Piazza del Campo, lately—with the time-serving which disgraces every town in Italy—called Vittorio Emanuele.” And with the stupidity and bad taste which seems to characterise all municipal governments in this respect all the world over, that of Florence has changed most of the old names of this kind, and in order to render the confusion more complete, has put the new names just over the old ones, with the simple addition of the word Gia or “formerly.” Whence came the legend current in the Anglo-American colony, that a newly arrived young lady, not as yet beyond the second lesson in Ollendorff, being asked where she lived, answered in Gia Street. She forgot the rest of the name.
One of these gaping gias is the Via del Parlascio gia Via delle Serve Smarrite, or the street of the maidservants strayed away or gone astray. Now Florence is famous for its pretty servant-girls, and if I may believe a halfpenny work, entitled “Seven Charming Florentine