At last the house was done. It was a big, old-fashioned, square house, with a wide hall running through the middle; on the east side were the library and dining-room; on the west, the parlor and a big billiard-room; upstairs were four large bedrooms; at the back of the house, a kitchen. No servants were to sleep in the house. Mr. Connor would have only Chinamen for servants; and they would sleep, with the rest of his Chinamen laborers, in what he called the Chinese quarter,—a long, low wooden building still farther up on the hill. Only Jim was to sleep in the house with Mr. Connor.
The Chinese quarter was a very comfortable house; and was presided over by a fat old Chinaman, who had such a long queue that Jim called him "Long Tail." His name was See Whong Choo, which, Jim said, was entirely too long to pronounce. There were twenty Chinamen on the place; and a funny sight it was to see them all file out of a morning to their work, every one with what looked like a great dinner-plate upside down on his head for a hat, and his long, black hair braided in a queue, not much bigger than a rat tail, hanging down his back.
People in California are so used to seeing Chinamen, that they do not realize how droll they look to persons not accustomed to the sight.
Their yellow skins, their funny little black eyes, set so slanting in their heads that you can't tell half the time whether they are looking straight at you or not, their shiny shaved heads and pig-tails, are all very queer. And when you first hear them talking together in their own tongue, you think it must be cats trying to learn English; it is a mixture of caterwaul and parrot, more disagreeable in sound than any language I ever heard.
About a year after Mr. Connor had moved into his new house, he got a letter, one night, which made him very unhappy. It told him that his sister and her husband were dead; they had died, both of them in one week, of a dreadful fever. Their two children had had the fever at the same time, but they were getting well; and now, as there was nobody in Italy to take care of them, the letter asked what should be done with them. Would Mr. Connor come out himself, or would he send some one? The Count and his wife had been only a few days ill, and the fever had made them delirious from the first, so that no directions had been given to any one about the children; and there the two poor little things were, all alone with their nurse in their apartment in the King's palace. They had had to live in the palace always, so that the Count could be ready to attend on the King whenever he was wanted.
The King's Palace.—Page 31.
Giuseppe and Maria (those were their names) never liked living there. The palace was much too grand, with its marble staircases, and marble floored rooms, so huge and cold; and armed soldiers for sentinels, standing at the corners and doors, to keep people from going into rooms without permission, and to keep watch also, lest somebody should get in and kill the King. The King was always afraid of being killed; there were so many unhappy and discontented persons in Italy, who did not want him to be King. Just think how frightful it must be to know every day,—morning, noon, and night,—that there was danger of somebody's coming stealthily into your room to kill you! Who would be a king? It used to make the children afraid whenever they passed these tall soldiers in armor, in the halls. They would hold tight to each other's hands, and run as fast as they could, past them; and when they got out in the open air, they were glad; most of all when their nurse took them into the country, where they could run on the grass and pick flowers. There they used often to see poor little hovels of houses, with gardens, and a donkey and chickens in the yard, and children playing; and they used to say they wished their father and mother were poor, and lived in a house like that, and kept a donkey. And then the nurse would tell them they were silly children; that it was a fine thing to live in a palace, and have their father one of the King's officers, and their mother one of the most beautiful of the Queen's ladies; but you couldn't have made the children believe it. They hated the palace, and everything about it, more and more every day of their lives.
Giuseppe was ten, and Maria was seven. They were never called by their real names: Giuseppe was called Jusy, and Maria was called Rea; Jusy and Rea, nobody would ever have guessed from that, what their real names were. Maria is pronounced Mahrea in Italy; so that was the way she came to be called Rea for shortness. Jusy gave himself his nickname when he was a baby, and it had always stuck to him ever since.