[5] The moss. Slang word among German students for money.
[6] Löwen—also money.
CHAPTER III.
The Three Pauls.[7]—The Artist's Third Story.
During my travels in Italy I happened once to be sojourning for some time in an obscure and sequestered Italian village high up in the Apennines, that chain of mountains which runs through the entire peninsular like the backbone of some antediluvian monster.
They are curious places, those Italian villages, with their tall, narrow houses and small windows, built up the slant of a mountain like steps of stairs. Their quaint roofs, balconies, arches, and buttresses, with at every step some rustic shrine containing a rude painting or representation of the Virgin Mary (the Madonna as they call her) or other saint. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets, the tumbling-down houses, from the windows of which the picturesque but dirty inhabitants may almost shake hands with one another across the road.
Then the odd nooks and angles in the by-streets that meet the stranger's eye on either hand as he ascends the uneven and slippery path-way leading to the highest point of view, which is generally crowned by some ruined feudal castle or fort built upon a rock and overgrown with ivy. They have a distinct character of their own, these mountain villages, and are as unlike as possible to anything seen in England. A mere verbal description is inadequate to give the faintest idea of their extreme picturesqueness. They require to be seen, and when this is impossible, a picture or sketch must give the next best idea of them to the mind of the stranger. I have several studies in oil-colour of these places within my portfolio, which you may look at for a moment if you like.