affections.  If she had been born in the right class and the right century, Peppina would have made an admirable and brilliant Borgia.

Beppo sent a stinging reproof in verse to Peppina by the new gardener, and the Little Genius read it to us, to show the poetic instinct of the discarded lover, and how well he had selected his rebuke from the store of popular verses known to gondoliers and fishermen of Venice:—

“No te fidar de l’ albaro che piega,
   Ne de la dona quando la te giura.
La te impromete, e po la te denega;
No te fidar de l’ albaro che piega.”

(“Trust not the mast that bends.
   Trust not a woman’s oath;
She’ll swear to you, and there it ends,
Trust not the mast that bends.”)

Beppo, Salemina, and I were talking together one morning,—just a casual meeting in the street,—when Peppina passed us.  She had a market-basket in each hand, and was in her gayest attire, a fresh crimson rose between her teeth being the last and most fetching touch to her toilet.  She gave a dainty shrug of her shoulders as she glanced at Beppo’s hanging head and hungry eye, and then with a light laugh hummed, “Trust not the mast that bends,” the first line of the poem that Beppo had sent her.

“It is better to let her go,” I said to him consolingly.

“Si, madama; but”—with a profound sigh—“she is very pretty.”

So she is, and although my idea of the fitness of things is somewhat unsettled when Peppina serves our dinner wearing a yoke and sleeves of coarse lace with her blue cotton gown, and a bunch of scarlet poppies in her hair, I can do nothing in the way of discipline because Salemina approves of her as part of the picture.  Instead of trying to develop some moral sense in the little creature, Salemina asked her to alternate roses and oleanders with poppies in her hair, and gave her a coral comb and ear-rings on her birthday.  Thus does a warm climate undermine the strict virtue engendered by Boston east winds.

Francesco—Cecco for short—is general assistant in the kitchen, and a good gondolier to boot.  When our little family is increased by more than three guests at dinner, Cecco is pressed into dining-room service, and becomes under-butler to Peppina.  Here he is not at ease.  He scrubs his tanned face until it shines like San Domingo mahogany, brushes his black hair until the gloss resembles a varnish, and dons coarse white cotton gloves to conceal his work-stained hands and give an air of fashion and elegance to the banquet.  His embarrassment is equalled only by his earnestness and devotion to the dreaded task.  Our American guests do not care what we have upon our bill of fare when they can steal a glance at the intensely dramatic and impassioned Cecco taking Pina into a corner of the dining-room and, seizing her hand, despairingly endeavour to find out his next duty.  Then, with incredibly stiff back, he extends his right hand to the guest, as if the proffered plate held a scorpion instead of a tidbit.  There is an extra butler to be obtained when the function is a sufficiently grand one to warrant the expense, but as he wears carpet slippers and Pina flirts with him from soup to fruit, we find ourselves no better served on the whole, and prefer Cecco, since he transforms an ordinary meal into a beguiling comedy.

“What does it matter, after all?” asks Salemina.  “It is not life we are living, for the moment, but an act of light opera, with the scenes all beautifully painted, the music charming and melodious, the costumes gay and picturesque.  We are occupying exceptionally good seats, and we have no responsibility whatever: we left it in Boston, where it is probably rolling itself larger and larger, like a snowball; but who cares?”

“Who cares, indeed?” I echo.  We are here not to form our characters or to improve our minds, but to let them relax; and when we see anything which opposses the Byronic ideal of Venice (the use of the concertina as the national instrument having this tendency), we deliberately close our eyes to it.  I have a proper regard for truth in matters of fact like statistics.  I want to know the exact population of a town, the precise total of children of school age, the number of acres in the Yellowstone Park, and the amount of wheat exported in 1862; but when it comes to things touching my imagination I resent the intrusion of some laboriously excavated truth, after my point of view is all nicely settled, and my saints, heroes, and martyrs are all comfortably and picturesquely arranged in their respective niches or on their proper pedestals.

When the Man of Fact demolishes some pretty fallacy like William Tell and the apple, he should be required to substitute something equally delightful and more authentic.  But he never does.  He is a useful but uninteresting creature, the Man of Fact, and for a travelling companion or a neighbour at dinner give me the Man of Fancy, even if he has not a grain of exact knowledge concealed about his person.  It seems to me highly important that the foundations of Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, or Spokane Falls should be rooted in certainty; but Verona, Padua, and Venice—well, in my opinion, they should be rooted in Byron and Ruskin and Shakespeare.

III

Casa Rosa, May 18.

Such a fanfare of bells as greeted our ears on the morning of our first awakening in Casa Rosa!

“Rise at once and dress quickly, Salemina!” I said.  “Either an heir has been born to the throne, or a foreign Crown Prince has come to visit Venice, or perhaps a Papal Bull is loose in the Piazza San Marco.  Whatever it is, we must not miss it, as I am keeping a diary.”

But Peppina entered with a jug of hot water, and assured us that there were no more bells than usual; so we lay drowsily in our comfortable little beds, gazing at the frescoes on the ceiling.

One difficulty about the faithful study of Italian frescoes is that they can never be properly viewed unless one is extended at full-length on the flat of one’s honourable back (as they might say in Japan), a position not suitable in a public building.

The fresco on my bedroom ceiling is made mysteriously attractive by a wilderness of mythologic animals and a crowd of cherubic heads, wings and legs, on a background of clouds; the mystery being that the number of cherubic heads does not correspond with the number of extremities, one or two cherubs being a wing or a leg short.  Whatever may be their limitations in this respect, the old painters never denied their cherubs cheek, the amount of adipose tissue uniformly provided in that quarter being calculated to awake envy and jealousy on the part of the predigested-food-babies pictured in the American magazine advertisements.

Padrona Angela furnishes no official key to the ceiling-paintings of Casa Rosa; and yesterday, during the afternoon call of four pretty American girls, they asked and obtained our permission to lie upon the marble floor and compete for a prize to be given to the person who should offer the cleverest interpretation of the symbolisms in the frescoes.  It may be stated that the entire difference of opinion proved that mythologic art is apt to be misunderstood.  After deciding in the early morning what our bedroom ceiling is intended to represent (a decision made and unmade every day since our arrival), Salemina and I make a leisurely toilet and then seat ourselves at one of the open windows for breakfast.

The window itself looks on the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile, St. Theodore and the Lion of St. Mark’s being visible through a maze of fishing-boats and sails, some of these artistically patched in white and yellow blocks, or orange and white stripes, while others of grey have smoke-coloured figures in the tops and corners.

Sometimes the broad stone-flagging pavement bordering the