Mrs. Sprague laughed. "They are certainly sociable enough," she said. "Yesterday I heard a woman read a letter aloud from an upper window to her friend on the sidewalk below."
Edith laughed in her turn. "Was the window in the same house where we saw the rooster and chickens in the upper balcony?" she asked.
"It is a funny sight to see the boys of Naples eating macaroni"
Rafael felt a touch of sadness at hearing their light talk. "The poor people!" he said. "When they live upstairs there is no other way but for them to keep their animals up there with them."
"Many of them seem to live in the basements of the rich," observed the girl.
To Rafael, the sight of such great poverty was no new thing, but Edith spoke of it constantly, and wrote of it to her father in America.
"There seem to be nothing but happiness and laziness here among these poor people," the letter said. "They live and eat upon the sidewalk, and it is a funny sight to see the boys swallowing macaroni.