then, and enjoying a conscious queenship of the place. At either side of her was a young girl, slim, dark, and bright, a mere slip of the mother. These girls kept their eyes cast down, and appeared to think only of their knitting. On the next step was Carlin’s group. Further on, a young mother steadied her year-old child between her knees and a chair, while she darned a stocking. One perceived that the whole and snowy-white stockings worn even by the poorest were not kept in order without constant care and labor. Near by, an old woman with a distaff spun flax, and entertained a company of men with her lively talk. This antique goddess was, perhaps, the wit of the place. She was, however, in no manner allied to the graces; for the thin gray hair gathered tightly with a comb to the top of her head, and entirely uncovered, and the white kerchief knotted round her neck, instead of being draped in the becoming Italian fashion, showed that she had long since ceased to hold by even the shadow of a personal charm. Outside the door of a little café, the only one in the place, half a dozen men sat at tables, drinking coffee and smoking, while on the door-step a man with a furnace and rotary stove, and a basket of charcoal beside him, roasted coffee to keep up the supply, lazily turning the crank while he listened to the gossip going on at the tables. On a neighboring step were gathered several women in a little sewing-circle. To these came a woman up the street, bearing on her head a tub covered over with nodding fern-leaves, which she set down on the wide top of the balustrade. The circle suspended their work while the woman displayed a sample of her wares—twelve frogs
run on to a stick. She was met with shrugs and exclamations of disapproval.
“Poor frogs!” said Isabel. “They look like little white babies.”
They were very poor little babies indeed, thin and small as spiders.
The frog-merchant, nothing disconcerted, laid aside her first sample and displayed another. “Oh! those are better,” the women cried, and immediately began to chaffer about the price.
Children swarmed everywhere. The close little town was as full of them as the shoe where the old woman we all know so well dwelt with her tribe of young ones. It did not need a powerful imagination to picture the place boiling over like a pot some day, with a many-colored froth of bambini down the mountain-side. It was out of the question that there should be room for the rising generation to stay in the town when they should have become a risen generation; for they were six or seven in a family, and already the houses were full.
“Perhaps one of them will go to America, and set up on some sidewalk a furnace for roasting chestnuts,” Bianca said. “And perhaps, some day, ten or fifteen years hence, we may stop and ask such a person what part of Italy he came from, and he will answer, ‘From Monte Compatri’; and we will say, ‘Ah! we have been there, at such a time; and perhaps it was you we saw playing in Via Lunga or in the piazza?’ and he will brighten an instant, and then, all at once, begin to cry. And Isabel will almost cry for him, and will give him her best handkerchief to wipe his tears away, perhaps wiping them for him; and I will buy all his chestnuts, which will be cold by the time we get home, and papa will slip some
money into his hand, and ask him if he wants work to do, and we will all tell him where we live, and to come to us if he should get into trouble. And then we will go home and talk for all the rest of the day about nothing but Italy, and that day we went up Monte Compatri. And Isabel will insist that she recognizes the fellow perfectly, and try to coax papa to take him for a gardener or something.”
“And then,” resumed Mr. Vane, continuing the story, “we shall have the lazy vagabond coming to us every day begging, and we shall miss things out of the room where he is left alone a few minutes, and Isabel will give him my clothes, till I shall have nothing left to wear.”
“Meantime, what will the Signora be doing?” that lady demanded, finding herself left out. “Is she to have no part?”