The table was a picture, with its bowls of crimson or pale-pink china roses. Each couvert had its own bouquet of heliotrope, fern, and camellia; while the profusion of handsome silver and of ancient Nuremberg glass combined still further to set off the tasteful appearance of the whole. What with the many German dishes, and the chatter of the German tongue all around me, I seemed to be transferred bodily from the shores of the Mediterranean to the dear and well-remembered Fatherland—an illusion which was not dispelled until an hour or so later on, when we found ourselves walking homewards under the brilliant, starlit sky of the south. On this particular night, too, the stars were shining with a radiancy which in England would betoken a hard frost; only that in this case the stars themselves looked so much larger, and in many instances shone with such intensity as to make themselves the centre of a distinct halo.
We met numbers of people on their way to midnight mass, either at the various shrines in the mountains or at favourite churches in Genoa, and at about eleven p.m. the bells began to ring, and went on at intervals for four hours, when they ceased for a time, to recommence at five a.m., and summon the worshippers to early mass.
I inaugurated Christmas in Italy by dressing with open windows, then joined the younger members of our party in carol-singing outside our hostess’s bedroom door; after which we all descended to the dining-room—not, as it would have been, in England, to spread out icy hands and feet to the welcome blaze of a roaring fire, but to open the long French windows and to stand awhile upon the balcony watching the lizards flitting swiftly in and out among the crevices of the marble, and the green frogs jumping about the boughs of the orange-trees.
Breakfast in Italy was never a heavy meal; but to-day, in honour of the day, polenta cake and chestnut bread were added to the usual omelette and roll, to which due attention having been paid, we returned to the balcony and eagerly awaited the postman.
He brought a goodly supply of letters for each of us, and with thankful hearts we set out for morning service.
The church was full of roses—red, white, and yellow. Arbutus and fern wreathed the east window and the chancel arch; and designs of roses upon a mossy ground filled in the panels of lectern and reading desk and the wide window-sills. There was, of course, a good attendance, and all joined with spirit in the service; but our clergyman rather damped the conclusion of it by preaching a very long and exceedingly dolorous sermon, in which he harped upon “vacant chairs,” “absent friends,” “broken circles,” and “dear invalids,” until he had reduced two-thirds of the congregation to tears.
Our dinner-party included a few English friends staying at the hotel, and one or two Italians, the latter being as much interested in our national customs as we were in theirs. It was certainly quaint enough to find that the Eastern Counties doggerel had its counterpart among the shepherds of Sardinia, with whom it is generally used as a cradle song.
“Lu letto meo est de battor cantones,
Et battor anghelos si bei ponem,
Duos in pes, et duos in cabitta.