It was in the ultimo piano that the Leatherstonepaughs pitched their lodge in a vast wilderness of colorful tiled roofs, moss-grown and lichen-laden, amid a forest of quaintly-shaped and smokeless chimneys. Their floors, guiltless of rugs or carpets, were of earthen tiles and worn into hollows where the feet of the palace-dwellers passed oftenest to and fro. A multitude of undraped windows opened like doors upon stone balconies, whither the inhabitants flew like a startled covey of birds every time the king and queen drove by in the street below, and upon which they passed always from room to room. The outer balcony looks down upon the Piazza Barberini and its famous Spouting Triton, with an horizon-line over the roofs broken by gloomy stone-pines and cypresses that seem to have grown from the buried griefs of Rome's dead centuries. The inner balcony overlooks the court, where through the wide windows of every story, amid the potted plants and climbing vines that never take on a shade of pallor in an Italian winter, and that adorn every Roman balcony, one could see into the penetralia of a dozen Roman families and wrest thence the most vital secrets—even to how much Romano Alfredo drank at dinner or whether lemon-juice or sour wine gave piquancy to Rosina's salad. Entirely unacquainted with these descendants of ancient patrician or pleb, the Leatherstonepaughs ventilated original and individual theories concerning them, and gave them names of their own choosing.
A CASE OF NON-REMITTANCE.
"Rameses the Great has quarrelled with the Sphinx and is flirting with the Pyramid," whispered young Cain one day as some of the family, leaning over the iron railing, looked into the leafy, azure-domed vault below, and saw into the dining-room of a family whose mysteriousness of habit and un-Italian blankness of face gave them a fanciful resemblance to the eternal riddles of the Orient.
The "Pyramid," whose wide feet and tiny head gave her her triangular title, was evidently a teacher, for she so often carried exercise-books and dog-eared grammars in her hand. She chanced at that moment to glance upward. "Lucia," she cried to the Sphinx, speaking with an Italian accent that she flattered herself was to the down-gazers an unknown tongue, "do look up to the fifth loggia. If there isn't the Huge Bear, the Middle-sized Bear and the Wee Bear looking as if they wanted to come down and eat us up!"
"Y' ain't fat 'nuf," yelled the Wee Bear before the elder Bruins had time to squelch him.
The studio-salon of the Leatherstonepaughs amid the clouds and chimneys of the Eternal City was a chapter for the curious. It was as spacious as a country meeting-house, as lofty as befits a palace. It was frescoed like some of the modern pseudo-Gothic and pine cathedrals that adorn the village-greens of New England hamlets, and its pot-pourri of artistic ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla. This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream of plum-pudding after a nightmare of mince-pie. Through this magnificence had drifted, while yet the Leatherstonepaughs saw Rome in all its idealizing mists, generations of artists. Sometimes these artists had had a sublime disdain of base lucre, and sometimes base lucre had had a sublime disdain of them. Some of the latter class—whose name is Legion—had marked their passage by busts, statuettes and paintings that served to remind Signora Anina, their landlady, that promises of a remittance can be as fair and false as the song of the Sirens or the guile of the Loreley. Crusaders in armor brandished their lances there in evidence that Michael Angelo Bivins never sent from Manhattan the bit of white paper to redeem them. Antignone—usually wearing a Leatherstonepaugh bonnet—mourned that Praxiteles Periwinkle faded out of the vistas of Rome to the banks of the Thames without her. Dancing Floras seemed joyous that they had not gone wandering among the Theban Colossi with Zefferino, instead of staying to pay for his Roman lodging; while the walls smiled, wept, simpered, threatened and gloomed with Madonnas, Dolorosas, Beatrices, sprites, angels and fiends, the authors of whose being had long ago drifted away on the ocean of poverty which sweeps about the world, and beneath which sometimes the richest-freighted ships go down. In the twenty years that Signora Anina has let her rooms to artists many such tragedies have written significant and dreary lines upon her walls.
That studio-salon was rich not alone in painting and sculpture. The whatnot was a museum whither might come the Northern Goth and Southern Vandal to learn what a Roman home can teach of the artistic taste that Matthew Arnold declares to be the natural heritage only of the nation which rocked the cradle of the Renaissance when its old Romanesque and Byzantine parents died. That whatnot was covered with tiny china dogs and cats, such as we benighted American Goths buy for ten cents a dozen to fill up the crevices in Billy's and Bobby's Christmas stockings. Fancy inkstands stood cheek by jowl with wire flower-baskets that were stuffed with crewel roses of such outrageous hues as would make the Angel of Color blaspheme. Cut-glass spoon-holders kept in countenance shining plated table-casters eternally and spotlessly divorced from the purpose of their being. There were gaudy china vases by the dozen and simpering china shepherdesses by the score. There were plaster casts of the whole of Signora Anina's family of nine children, from the elder fiery Achilles to the younger hysterical Niobe. There were perfume-bottles enough to start a coiffeur in business, and woolly lambs enough for a dozen pastoral poems or as many bucolic butchers. But the piano was piled high with Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's delicious dream-music, while a deluge of French novels had evidently surged over that palace of the Leatherstonepaughs.
When the family took possession of their share of the palazzo a corner of this studio-salon was dedicated to a peculiar member of their family. From that corner she seldom moved save as she swept away in some such elegant costume as the others wore only upon gala-occasions, or in some picturesque or wildly-fantastic garb that would have lodged her in a policeman's care had she ever been suffered to escape thus from the palace. All day long, day after day, she tarried in her corner mute and motionless, eying all comers and goers with a haughty stare. Sometimes she leaned there with rigid finger pressed upon her lip, like a statue of Silence; sometimes her hands were pressed pathetically to her breast, like a Mater Dolorosa; sometimes both arms hung lax and limp by her side, like those of a heart-broken creature; and sometimes she wildly clutched empty air, like a Leatherstonepaugh enthusiastically inebriated or gone stark, staring, raving mad!
