ROMA BEATA

Terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci

From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Miss Mabel Norman

ROMA BEATA

Letters from the Eternal City
BY
MAUD HOWE
AUTHOR OF “A NEWPORT AQUARELLE,” “THE SAN ROSARIO RANCH,”
“MAMMON,” “PHILLIDA,” “LAURA BRIDGMAN,” ETC.
With Illustrations from Drawings by John Elliott
and from Photographs
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1909
Copyright, 1903, 1904,
By J. B. Lippincott & Company.
Copyright, 1904,
By The Century Co.
Copyright, 1904,
By America Company.
Copyright, 1904,
By The Outlook Company.
Copyright, 1904,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A.
To My Sister
LAURA E. RICHARDS

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ROMA BEATA

I
LOOKING FOR A HOME

Rome, January 20, 1894.

Rome, which we reached Thursday, is very much changed since I last saw it; imagine the Fountain of Trevi, all the principal streets, even many of the smaller ones, gleaming with electric lights!

We at once engaged an apartment bathed with sun in the Piazza di Spagna, sun from early morning till late afternoon. But when we moved into it, the day was overcast. The apartment which had been tropical with the sun when we hired it was arctic without it!

We interviewed our padrona (landlady), an immense woman, and demanded a fire.

“But, Excellency, it is not good for the health.”

We told her we understood our health better than she, and reminded her that fires had been promised.

“Excellency, yes, if it makes cold; but to-day it makes an immense heat. Diamine! this saloon is a furnace.”

The thermometer could not have stood above forty-two degrees, but she was not to be bullied or cajoled. Then J. went out and bought wood “unbeknownst” to her and lighted a fire in the parlor grate. All the smoke poured into the room. The padrona charged with fixed bayonets.

“Gentry, we are ruined! Not is possible to make fire here.”

“Why did you not say so before?”

“Who could figure to himself that gentry so instructed would do a thing so strange?”

These people are so polite that this was an insult, meant as such, taken as such. In the end J. prevailed. A small fireplace was unearthed from behind the wardrobe in our bedroom. He worked like a stoker, but the badly constructed chimney swallowed all the heat. For three days I was never warm, save when in bed. Monday we forfeited three months’ rent, paid in advance, and went, tame and crestfallen, to a pension, a sadder and a wiser pair.

Palazzo Santo Croce, March 10, 1894.

The warm weather has come, bright and beautiful, and here we are again, in a furnished apartment, but with what a difference! These pleasant rooms belong to Marion Crawford. That princely soul, having let his lower suite to the William Henry Hurlburts, lends us the pretty little suite he fitted up for the “four-in-hand,” as he calls his quartette of splendid babes. We are to remain here till our own apartment is found. We have bought our linen, blankets, batterie de cuisine, and other beginnings of housekeeping, and yesterday—am I not my mother’s own child?—I gave a tea-party for two American girls. They wanted to see some artists, so I asked the few I know, Apolloni (well named the big Apollo), Sartorio, and Mr. Ross, he who spoke of the cherubs in a certain Fra Angelico picture as “dose dear leetle angles bimbling round in de corner.” I invited also Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead; he is the author of the American Baedeker, the editor of all English Baedekers. I expected to see him bound in scarlet instead of dressed in hodden-gray. We had much tea, more talk, and most panettone—half bread, half cake, with pignoli and currants; when fresh, it seems the best thing to eat in the world, until you get it the next day toasted for breakfast, when it is better.

My rooms are still ablaze with yesterday’s flowers. I bought for two francs in the Piazza di Spagna what I thought a very extravagant bunch of white and purple flags and white and purple lilacs, like those in our old garden at Green Peace. Helen came in a little later with a bunch twice as big and a glow of pink peonies added; in the middle of the tea-drinking Sartorio arrived with a gigantic armful of yellow gorse. Spring is really here! The trees are all green now. When we first came the stone pines were the chief glory; now the Pincio is gay with snow-white maple trees and flowering shrubs, mostly white and purple. Is there any rotation of color in flowers? It has often struck me there must be! Sometimes everything in blossom seems to be lilac, another season it is all yellow, then all red. I notice the reds come last, in midsummer chiefly,—has this to do with the heat? Max Nordau—cheerful person that, by the way—says that red is hysterical peoples’ favorite color; violet, melancholiacs’. There is a boy who sits all day under my window selling bird whistles, on which he warbles pleasantly. He is never without a red rosebud worn over his left ear. I wonder if he is hysterical!

Now that the good weather has come, I often go to the churches to hear the music. At the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel the scholars of the Blind Institution furnished the music—a good band, though not equal to that of the Perkins Institution, in Boston. The church was crammed with very dirty people and many children. One mother carried a strapping yearling, a splendid angel of a child; three toddlers clung to her skirts, and a newborn baby howled in the grandam’s arms. After a time the two women exchanged babies, the grandam took the heavy youngster, the mother took the new-born, and, squatting down, calmly suckled it. The music was marred by the wailing of this and other infants, but no one seemed to mind. After all, it was the only way the women could have heard mass; the little ones were too young to be left alone at home.

The Romans are devoted to their children, although their ways are not our ways; no woman of the upper class nurses her child, baby carriages are unknown, and swaddling is still in vogue, at least with the lower classes. I know a young American lady, married to a Roman, who imported a perambulator for her first baby. The balia (wet-nurse), a superb cow of a woman, refused to trundle it, saying she was not strong enough, although I saw her carry a heavy trunk upstairs on her head while I was calling at the house! The baby is now a big eighteen-months-old boy; every day the balia goes out to give him an airing, carrying him in her arms! Here, leading-strings are facts, not symbols. In Trastavere, where I went sightseeing yesterday with Helen—peering, as she calls it,—the best sight we saw was a darling red-haired baby in leading-strings stumbling along in front of its grandmother. In the division of labor, the care of the children falls upon the grandmother; the mother’s time is too valuable; if she is not actually employed in earning money, there is the heavier work of the household to do. To use the pet phrase of the boarders, “things are different here from what they are at home.”

Palazzo Rusticucci, July 10, 1894.

Here we are in a home of our own! One moonlight night J. came in with the news that he had found the very apartment he had been looking for; if I didn’t mind, we would go and see it at once. Naturally, I didn’t “mind.” We took a botte and threaded the network of narrow streets that lead down to the Tiber. We crossed the river, a huge brown flood, silver where it swirled about the piers; drove past the Castle of St. Angelo to the dingy old palace at the junction of the Borgo Nuovo and the Piazza San Pietro. He would not let me stop to look at anything, but hurried me through the entrance, along the corridor, past a courtyard with orange trees and a fountain where the nightingales were singing, up a high, wide stairway guarded by recumbent statues of terra-cotta Etruscan ladies, to a rusty old green door. We pulled a bell-rope and set a bell jangling inside. The door was opened by the esattore (agent), a brisk young man, who carried a three-beaked brass lamp by whose light we explored the apartment. They hurried me so that I could only see that the high ceilings were of carved wood, that the windows were large, and that I liked the shape of the rooms. J. kept saying, “Wait till you see the terrace.” The terrace, or house-top, is a flat roof; it covers the whole length and breadth of the apartment, and belongs exclusively to it. A parapet three feet high runs around it; at one end is a small room with a second smaller terrace on its roof, reached by a flight of stone steps; at the other end is a high wall with a little, open belfry on top. The view is sublime; you look down into the Square of St. Peter’s with the Egyptian obelisk in the middle, Bernini’s great colonnades on either side, the Church of St. Peter’s at the end, with the Vatican, a big, awkward mass of a building, behind it, and in the foreground the twin fountains sending up their columns of powdered spray. On the left loomed the Castle of St. Angelo; it was light enough to see the time by the clock. You can imagine all the rest,—the city spread out like a map, the dark masses of trees marking the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, the Campagna, the Sabine and the Alban hills beyond, Mt. Soracte, our familiar friend, on the left, over and under all the soft deep notes of the big bell of St. Peter’s throbbing out the Angelus.

The bargain was struck that very night! But when we went over the next day J. let the cat out of the bag by saying, “I was afraid if you went by daylight, and saw what an old ruin it was, you would never consent to our taking it!”

It did look discouraging. The last tenant, a monsignore, who lived here thirty years, never allowed the owners to make any repairs; he said he could not be bothered with workmen. He died a short time ago, leaving a red rose growing in a wooden half-barrel on the terrace. The owner of the palace, Signor Mazzocchi, armorer to the Pope, waited till the new tenant should turn up before making any changes. The palace was built in 1661. It has gone to wrack and ruin, but it is a magnificent old wreck. It stands on the site of the house the great architect Bramante built for Raphael, one pier of which is still standing, built into our walls. It once belonged to a Cardinal Rusticucci, whose arms are cut in stone over one of the doors; he was of the same family as the gentleman Dante met in one of the lower circles of the Inferno.

“Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce, Jacopo Rusticucci fui; e certo la fiera moglie più ch’altro mi nuoce.”

“And I who am placed on the cross with these was Jacob Rusticucci. It is certain my proud wife harmed me more than another!”

The palace seems to be called indifferently Rusticucci, Accoramboni, and Mazzocchi. We hesitated for some time between the three names; finally the Dantesque name carried the day, and I have had Palazzo Rusticucci engraved upon our cards. It is considered very plebeian here to have your address on your cards, but I cling to my American ideas.

The monsignore’s red rose on the terrace looked so lonely that I went last Wednesday to Rag Fair in the Campo dei Fiori and bought a pink ivy geranium, some pansies, and a white carnation to keep it company; they were absurdly cheap; flowers are a necessity here, not a luxury. I also bought a sack of earth, some flower-pots, and a watering-can. I got up at dawn the next morning and potted my plants; hard work! When J. came up at seven o’clock for coffee, there they stood in a row at the end of the terrace. It was a real surprise; I was very proud, till I found that he had to do the work all over again, just because I had not put anything in the bottom of the flower-pots to keep the earth from running out when they are watered! J. says we must have more, many more, plants. Sunday he was pottering about all day with the plumber. We are to have another quarto of water laid on, the pipes carried to the upper terrace, and a vast Florentine flower-pot—you know the kind, terra-cotta—for the receiver. Some day we mean to have a marble sarcophagus in its place. They took the beautiful long zinc bath-tub for the tank; this was a blow, but Pompilia and Filomena found it too convenient! Every one who has seen it on the upper terrace says, “Do you take your bath up here?” It is not easy to laugh at this inevitable joke; I wait for it now from each new visitor, and feel relieved to get it over.

The terrace is our poetry, and we have parlous good prose downstairs. The walls are three feet thick, built to keep out both heat and cold; the whole house is paved with red, white, and black tiles in geometrical designs. The old green door opens into a vestibule leading to the anticamera, which has two big windows. The salotto opens from this; it has a splendid sei cento carved wood ceiling, and pale nile-green doors with gilt mouldings and handles. The dining-room, square and high, leads from the salotto; beyond is a charming room with a fresco of Apollo driving the horses of the sun. This will be our guest-room when we have a guest; it is now my den. On the other side of the salotto is our yellow bedroom: the nicest room I have ever lived in; it has a vaulted stone ceiling. Do you remember Tennyson’s poem?

“O darling room, my heart’s delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white,
There is no room so exquisite,
No little room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.”

Well, ours is just like that, only it is not “little” but very large. These rooms are in the front of the palace, looking down into the Piazza San Pietro and facing mezzo giorno, due south. They all have fireplaces (J. put them in himself with the aid of Lorenzo), the sun pours into them, and if one can be warm in Rome, in winter, we shall be. From the passage outside the kitchen a small stone stairway leads up past a tiny oratory to the terrace. The oratory is charming in shape, not quite round, more like an ellipse with two marble seats. The floor slopes to the middle, where there is a grating to let the rain out, for it is open to the sky; its dome is a minute replica of the Pantheon’s. The monsignore must have sat here to read his “hours”; there is nothing to distract the mind, no sound save the bells of St. Peter’s, nothing to see but the sky and clouds overhead and the low-flying rondinelle swooping across and across at sunset.

In the salotto (Filomena sometimes calls it the salottino, to my rage) there is a handsome sofa and pair of armchairs, a fine black oak table, and my Benares tray and stand for tea. The rest of the furniture is very meek and cane-bottomed. We have in this room a lovely landscape of the Campagna by Sartorio, a silver-point drawing by Hughes, the English artist, and a cast from the Alhambra.

July 28, 1894.

Thirty-six degrees centigrade for the last three days! Those clever children of yours will know how hot that really is. I don’t know, but people mop their brows a good deal, and say that the heat of this summer is “unprecedented and incredible.” It troubles me very little; once or twice only I have felt rather tired by it, and I fancy it is sharpening up my temper a little; but I eat and sleep like several tops, only I can’t do much of anything out of doors. Yesterday I went to see the friendly Countess C., who has a small city garden with shade-trees, under which we sat and consumed iced wine and cakes, and talked about the Pope. She is an American and very Black in her politics, though her husband is a White and fought for Victor Emmanuel.

At the suggestion of Mr. Richard Greenough I have adopted the Roman scheme of life and divide every day into two. I am up at five, have my coffee, and read my paper on the terrace. At eight the rooms are hermetically sealed; outside shutters, windows, and inside blinds are closed. A melancholy twilight pervades everywhere, except in my den, where I keep one eye of the house open to read, write, cipher, and catch fleas by. I go out early, do my errands, make my visits, and try to be at home by ten; sometimes I am delayed till twelve. Luncheon is at one; after this the whole household, the whole city, takes its siesta. From two till four Rome sleeps! Down in the piazza the workmen lie at full length on the pavement, their arms under their heads. Cabmen curl up inside their cabs, horses sleep between the shafts, even small boys sleep! At first I would none of it. I only yielded when I found that the soldiers in the barracks opposite are obliged by the military regulations to take a daily siesta.

“And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?”

Soon after four o’clock the sea-breeze comes up and life begins again. By five I am ready for tea on the terrace. Sometimes we go instead to Ronzi and Singer’s for granite, a sort of sherbet made of snow from the mountains flavored with coffee or lemon, very delicious and cooling to the blood. By this time the streets are filled with people. The Roman girls look charming in their pretty light summer dresses; pink muslin seems to be the fashion this season. Dinner gets pushed back later and later; we really must reform. Last night we did not sit down till quarter to nine. The nights are divinely cool; we go to the terrace from the dinner-table, and sit there till bedtime under the friendly stars.

To-day I have been driving in the Villa Pamfili Doria; for proof accept this pink petal from the Egyptian lotus in the lake. I never saw them growing before. They are wonderful; the pads immense, with a green velvety surface on which the water rolls up into crystal balls; the flower, when it is closed, large and pointed like a classic flame, does not lie on the water, as I supposed, but stands erect, some eight or ten inches above it. My uncle and a few other privileged people are allowed to drive here even when the villa is closed to the public. We always meet a modest-looking old couple in a coupé; he is blind and has a long white beard; she wears a bonnet like a bat and carries a green fan with which she screens her eyes. Cardinal A., his secretary walking beside him, two attendants following, is always there, and several other priests; except for these, an occasional gardener, and the peacocks, we have the glorious old place all to ourselves. There are deer and Jersey cows and the lake and the pretty formal garden in front of the house; it has the feeling of being private property—a gentleman’s place. The name “Mary,” clipped in box on the hillside in memory of a beloved wife, an English Princess Doria, gives me the same sort of satisfaction as the Taj Mahal and the tomb of Cæcilia Metella.

Your last letter clamors for details of our housekeeping. In certain respects it is idyllic. For comfort I have never known its equal. We have two women, Filomena, the Umbrian housemaid and waitress, and Pompilia, my black-browed Tuscan cook (Romans do not make good servants). These two do the work easily with the help of old Nena, the fifth wheel to our coach. Helen calls her the footman; she does all our errands, carries my notes, and when I am hard pressed for time leaves our cards. Pompilia brings me her accounts every morning, so much for beef, bread, butter, spaghetti, wine, oil, and salt. I buy my fruit and groceries myself. So much custom allows. It is more signorile, however, to leave all buying to your servants, but a certain latitude, of which I have availed myself, is allowed to artists. Store-rooms and ice-chests are unknown; we live from hand to mouth, buying each day’s provisions “fresh and fresh.” The butchers shut up shop at eleven in the morning and do not open again till six in the evening. Business begins at the shriek of dawn; the first sound I hear in the early gray is the sharpening of the butcher’s knife in the shop opposite. They keep the meat in cool “grottos” underground. How they manage without ice is a mystery!

The Borgo, our quarter,—Leonine City is its best name,—is not fashionable, and the street-cries are still in full force here. The earliest is the Acetosa water, “Fiasche fresche aqua ’Cetosa!” I hear it in my dreams, plaintive, melodious. “Flasks of fresh Acetosa water!” Then comes the rumbling of the cart, the hee-hawing of the donkey, and the remarks of the man to the donkey. This is what he said to-day: “I call all the apostles to observe this infamous beast of a donkey: may he die squashed, this son of a hangman!” I do assure you he is the dearest donkey, pretty and willing, but rather restive about stopping. The Acetosa Spring is a mile and a half from the city, out Viale Parioli way. It has been in use since the days of the Cæsars, perhaps since the days of the Tarquins. The Romans take a course of Aqua ’Cetosa every summer; six weeks is the orthodox time; it is “cooling to the blood.” It costs two cents a flask.

Signor Augusto Rotoli has written out for me the notes of several of the cries. In the Acetosa score he has indicated the blows of the driver, the kicks of the donkey, and finally the patter-patter of the poor little beastie’s hoofs over the rough paving-stones of the Borgo Nuovo:

VENDITORE DELL’ AQUA ACETOSA.

Nel silenzio del mattino, all’ alba, in distanza, e poi piu presso alla residenza—questo è un effetto molto caratteristico. [1]

At seven o’clock a herd of twenty goats is driven into the piazza by two dark satyrs with shaggy thighs and flashing eyes, peasants in goat-skin trousers they are from the Campagna. The children crowding round them in the piazza, and I looking down from my terrace, watch them as they milk their yellow-eyed beasts. Goats’ milk, Pompilia says, is good for consumptives and delicate babies; I have not yet learned whether she considers it heating or cooling to the blood. We are not allowed to have broccoli, carrots, or mutton at this season because they are heating, and are obliged to have more rennet than we like because it is cooling!

After the goats are gone the blackberry man comes. I like his cry best of all, it is in a melancholy minor, “More, more, chi vuol maniar le more?—more fate!” “Moors, moors, who wishes to eat moors?—ripe moors!” Moors, if you please, because they are black!

IL VENDITORE DI MORE.

“Buy a broom” is far prettier in Italian—Romanesque, I should say—than in English. At first we could not make out the words, the man seemed to be singing “O! so far away!” The notes, long drawn out, pensive, fascinating, like a sailor’s chantey, haunted us. “O! scopare, cacc’ aragni!” “O brooms, chase the spiders!” The latter are Turks’ heads on the ends of long sticks, necessary for ceilings twenty feet high like ours.

LO SCOPARO.

Nella folla del giorno nel frastuono di carrozze e veicoli questo tono minore è molto rimarchevole. [2]

VENDITORE DI PESCE.

“Pesce vivo, calamaretti!” “Live fish, little inkstands!” The calamaretti, small cuttle-fish, are]

called little inkstands because of the black liquid—sepia, isn’t it?—which they eject when attacked. Fried a golden brown and served with fresh soles as a garnishing they are too good for common people.

The umbrella mender is a bit of a poet, he makes his cry rhyme. “Ombrellare. Chi ha ombrelle per raccomodare?” “The umbrella man. Who has umbrellas to mend?”

“O ricotta, ricotta!” When I hear this I run to the window, wave my handkerchief, and the ricotta man brings up a fresh goat’s-milk cheese in a green wicker basket; it is a sort of spiritualized cottage cheese. When quite new, eaten with maritozzi warm from the bakery downstairs, it makes a better luncheon than I can get at the Café di Roma.

“Alice!” (pronounced a-lee-chee) “anchovies,” is a strident cry which we hear at intervals all day. Anchovies are a staple food with the lower classes. At home I only remember them as an appetizer at some brutally long dinner parties. The people eat anchovies with bread or with macaroni; they are cheap, strong of flavor, and a little of them goes a long way. We have them with crostine and provatura for luncheon sometimes. Provatura is cheese made of buffalo’s milk. Little crusts of bread with alternate layers of provatura and anchovies skewered together like chickens’ livers and toasted make a pleasant dish.

One cry I do not like, “aqua vita!” short and sharp in the early morning, as soon as the newsboys begin to shout “Don Quichotte” “Popolo Romano,” “Corriere,” this cry comes like an antiphony. “Aqua vita!” “Water of life?” Water of death! brandy.

We sent all the way to the English bakery in Via Babuino for our bread till the day I met Count Luigi Primoli in the baker’s shop on the ground floor of our palace; he was tucking a brown paper parcel into his pocket. There had been a function at the Vatican. He had been to pay his respects to Leo XIII., and on his way home had stopped to buy what he told me were the best maritozzi in Rome. The baker is an important person; he owns his shop and four caged nightingales, which sing divinely. We now buy our bread, flour, macaroni, and oil from him, and he changes all the neat fifty-franc notes we get from the banker’s; he can always be trusted to give honest money.

I soon found out that in all domestic affairs I must learn Italian methods; it was useless to try and teach Pompilia and Filomena our ways. After the tussle over the washing I gave it up. Set tubs, wash-boards, wringing-machines? Nothing of that sort. On Sunday evening the clothes are put in a large copper vessel, a basket-work cover is laid on top, over which a layer of wood-ashes is spread. Boiling water is then poured on slowly, percolating a little at a time through the clothes, which are bleached by the lye of the ashes; this is the bucato. When they have stood long enough in this witch’s cauldron the clothes are carried down to the basement and washed with cold water in the vast stone fountains of the palace, which we have the right to use one day in the week. The women employ a stiff brush and the queerest green soap to scrub the linen; if we have any table-cloths left at the end of six months, we shall be lucky. The American clothes-pins and line I sent for are neatly displayed in the kitchen as curiosities. We “hang out” on an iron clothes-line to which the linen is tied by small pieces of twine, as it was in the days of the Empress Faustina. We are no better than our mothers! The clothes are sent out to a stiratrice to be ironed.

Our cooking fuel costs us one dollar a week. Saturday morning the carbonaro arrives, carrying on his back a huge sack of charcoal, for which I pay five francs. I am told it is ten cents too much, but one must pay something for being “forestieri.” The cooking is done over four little square holes filled with charcoal, set in a table of blue and white tiles; a big hood overhead carries off the fumes; quite the prettiest kitchen range I ever saw! The charcoal is kindled by means of paper, little fagots, and a turkey-feather fan plied by old Nena. I like my kitchen, it is full of such queer, nice pots and pans; a row of deceitful copper saucepans hang along the wall, always bright, never used, but brushed over with white of egg, which acts like a varnish to protect the polish; a big white marble mortar, a long copper kettle for the fish, and the green and yellow bowls and mixing dishes are my favorite utensils. I foresee that the old brass scaldino J. picked up at the junk shop will some day serve as an ornament to the front hall at home. We have a brace of warming-pans and the queerest metal box for live charcoal. When you want a warm bath you fill your tub with cold water, put hot coals in this box, screw it up tight, and put it into the water, which it finally heats. Prehistoric? Fortunately, we prefer our baths cold! Pompilia begged some slips from our geraniums, planted them in empty kerosene cans, and now the kitchen window is bright with flowers. Everything grows so quickly here that it is easier to have plants than not.

August 16, 1894.

The parroco (parish priest) has called. Filomena came all of a flutter to summon me. The visit has raised us in our servants’ eyes; they have never before lived with pagans or Protestants. I like the parroco. He is a fine man of forty-five, evidently a peasant, but possessing that assured, courteous manner the priests all have; it is wonderful, the bearing and polish the Church gives them. The parroco was rather disturbed at being offered a cup of tea at five in the afternoon,—it was stupid of me to have it brought in; the Anglo-Saxon association of eating and drinking with sociability is hard to get rid of,—but he made a long visit and gave me good advice about the local charities. The gnawing poverty all about us is the drop of gall in our honeypot. Our door is literally besieged by our poor neighbors and by begging monks and nuns. At the parroco’s suggestion we now divide what we can afford to give between the benevolent society which looks after the sick and old, the Trinitarian order of monks, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. Besides these a man calls on Saturday morning from the “Holy Family” and carries away a big bag filled with robaccio,—trash,—things that at home would go into the ash-barrel.

General Booth must have got his idea of the Household Brigade from some such institution, and I am learning new lessons in economy every day! Nothing is wasted here, not the tiniest scrap of food nor the most disreputable cast-off garment. My servants watch for my old shoes; three pairs of eyes are fastened on them daily. You know how much more precious old shoes are than new,—especially Appleton’s, which come all the way from Boston? Well, yesterday I was shamed into giving away my most cherished old boots and am wearing to-day a horrid stiff new pair. Every night a bundle is smuggled out of the house full of odds and ends of food which support a certain poor family whose grandmother has attached herself to us. Her perquisites are the old newspapers, empty bottles, stale cake and bread, sour milk, the very orange and lemon peels, and the leavings from the servants’ table. I am so thankful there is enough to fill the poor old blue market handkerchief, but it would never do for me to show knowledge of its existence; that would spoil the sport.

You ask about the comparative expense of life here. People who would be called well off at home are rich in Rome; people we should consider poor can live here with much comfort and some luxury. For instance, cabs cost sixteen cents a course for two people, or forty cents an hour. I pay my seamstress fifty cents a day, and my cook seven dollars a month; a clever young Italian doctor, modern, up-to-date, well educated, is quite satisfied with a dollar a visit. Good hotels (not the two or three most extravagant) charge twelve francs (about two dollars and forty cents) a day. Meat, chicken, eggs, fish, fruit, and vegetables are cheap; but all imported groceries are horribly dear by reason of the fifty per cent. duty they must pay. Coffee costs fifty cents a pound, sugar twenty, American kerosene oil is sold in five-gallon cans for three dollars—fancy! we pay more for petroleum than for olive oil or for wine. Postage stamps, salt, and tobacco—all government monopolies—are sold only at tobacconists’. Milk is not cheap; the best in Rome comes from Prince Doria’s herd of Jerseys. Unfortunately, we are not on his milkman’s route; our milk comes from the Villa Ada, which belongs to an American lady, a daughter of Rogers, the sculptor. It is very good milk, quite different from that we get at a pinch from the vaccaria round the corner, where in a dark, dreadful dungeon stable pale cows, with long untrimmed hoofs, pass their melancholy lives. Pompilia is in despair because we will drink our milk unboiled; when I saw the prisoner cows I understood why. Italy is a poor country, and poor people can live comfortably here. Rents, service, and food are all cheap; it may be a paltry reason for abandoning one’s country that one can get more pork for one’s shilling elsewhere, but it is a potent reason. Here in Rome prices are all scaled to the different pockets. I pay less at the same shops for the same things than my rich friends pay, but some things even the rich cannot secure; certain conveniences—rapid transit, steam heat, “rapid delivery,” express service—cannot be purchased, and, what is really serious, good schooling is not to be had at any price, so few Americans with children to educate settle in Rome. But for men and women there is no school like Rome. Willy nilly, I learn something every time I go out of doors, whether it be to the Appian Way, the Via Sacra, the Forum, or to the Corso. The yellow Tiber, the fountains, the nightingales of the Villa Medici, the ilex trees of the Borghese, seem to whisper the secrets of the city with the mighty past, the mother and law-giver of nations.

The Appian Way

From a photograph

II
CADENABBIA—WOERISHOVEN—PFARRER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP

Cadenabbia, Lake of Como, August 29, 1894.

I fear the vagabond instinct is the strongest one I have, for I was glad to leave Rome a week ago—to leave my Rome, think of it! with its galleries all to myself, and its churches, and no tourists; still, the fleas had become too vicious, and all the “lame ducks” were upon me—shabby gentlemen attached to the Vatican, seedy artists with portfolios of unsold sketches, decayed gentlewomen professing Dante and lacking pupils—for the foreign colony, by which they live, has dissolved, and we were the last Anglo-Saxons left in town except some young secretaries of the British Embassy.

Unless one has seen the Sistine Chapel at noon on a blazing August day one has not really seen it. The figure of Adam receiving the touch of Life from the Creator is, for me, the highest expression of the art of painting. The hours I spent across the way at the Vatican and St. Peter’s made up for any small inconveniences of the heat I may have suffered. If one is to pass a summer in a city instead of in your green Maine woods, many-fountained Rome is the city of all others! There are no mosquitoes,—literally, we have neither a bar nor a netting in the house—the nights are cool, the citizens are too poor to go away in any appreciable number, so there is none of that desolate feeling which makes London a Desert of Sahara in August, and Paris worse. But the heat of the last week of August drove us to the Italian lake country, and here we are at Cadenabbia—from Ca’ di Nabbia, house of Nabby, an old woman who once lived in a little hut, or ca’, on the shore. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I am writing before breakfast. Outside my window is the Lake of Como with its mountains. On one side there is deep purple shadow, the other palpitates with light. Soon we shall have coffee and green figs in the pergola below, under the canopy of grape-leaves. Cadenabbia is all villas and hotels; behind, half way up the hill, is the village of Griente, to reach which we climb steep streets of steps paved with round cobbles. Griente is all gray stone, with delicious arches spanning the narrow ways. The syndic’s house stands apart; his fat wife and pretty daughter seem always to be sitting sewing before the door. The padre, a dear old man, showed us his garden and called our attention to the trellis he had contrived for his grapes. We must taste his wine, made from these Muscats—made, I warrant, by his own hands. We did taste it and found it excellent.

“Sapete, Signori,” he said, “un goccettino di vino e’ buona per lo stomaco (Know, Signors, that a little drop of wine is good for the stomach).” St. Paul was of his way of thinking.

J. has been seized with a fury of sketching; he goes every day to Griente and draws and draws! The old women and the children make much of him. Yesterday he heard one boy say to another, “It must be very hard to paint and smoke a pipe at the same time.”

“Ma ché!” said the other, “he only does it for bravado!”

The other day he frescoed a lad’s nose with vermilion like a Cherokee brave’s; since then all the boys in the district torment him for the ends of his pastels.

This is one of the prosperous provinces of Italy. The town of Como has silk manufactories, where the best Italian silk stockings are made and the nicest of the piece silks. There is a feeling of comparative bien être in all classes which adds much to one’s own comfort. The flood of travellers that pours through here brings a certain prosperity, though I incline to think it a specious one. Everybody asks, “What would Italy do without the tourists?” Perhaps if the people were not so busy making silly knicknacks to sell to tourists, they would pay more attention to cultivating their land. Improved agricultural methods are what Italy needs above all else; she has the finest soil and climate in Europe; she could supply half the continent with fruit, oil, and wine if she had a little more common sense! I have seen oranges and lemons rotting under the trees at Sorrento, and in Calabria I have seen grapes used to enrich the soil! This is not because the Italians are “lazy”—“lazy Italians!” there never was a more unjust reproach borne by any people—the Italian peasants are the hardest-worked people I know. They tug and toil just to put bread in their mouths; they almost never taste meat. Last Sunday afternoon at the railroad station in Rome the floor and platform were covered with sleeping peasants waiting for the train to take them to their work. Each man carried round his neck seven loaves of coarse bread strung on a piece of rope, his week’s rations,—dry bread, with a “finger” of wine to moisten it if he is lucky! It is evident that they are willing to work, and yet Italy is miserably poor! Somebody is blundering somewhere, I am too rank an outsider to know who. Some foreign writers lay every ill Italy endures to the heavy taxes the government has imposed. I am not so sure that what Italy has got in the last quarter century is not worth the price she has paid for it. There are abuses, steals, a bureaucracy, and a prodigious megalomania (swelled head), but the people are learning to read and write!

That reminds me of what I heard Sir William Vernon Harcourt say at a luncheon in Rome. Some one asked where he was staying. “I am stopping at the Hotel Royal opposite to the Ministry of Finance,” he said. “Strange that Italy should have the largest finance building in the world and the smallest finances!” The folly of putting up these mammoth public buildings, these dreadful monuments to Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour, and the other great men who brought about the Risorgimento, is appalling; but Italy is realizing her mistakes; she is learning at an astonishing rate.

Woerishoven, Bavaria, September 20, 1894.

I have been banished by bronchitis from the Eden, Cadenabbia, and have come to Father Kneipp’s Water-Cure, near Munich, although it is a little late in the season to take the “cure.” It is de rigueur before seeing Father Kneipp to consult a regular practitioner, who pronounces whether or no you are a fit subject; people with weak hearts are not allowed to take the cure. I paid a small sum, became a member of the Kneipp Verein, received a blank-book—in which the medico wrote out a diagnosis—and a ticket stating the hour of my appointment with “the Pfarrer,” as Father Kneipp is called. I arrived a little before time at an immense barrack of a place like the waiting-room at a railroad station. The door to the consulting-room was guarded by two functionaries who read aloud our numbers as our turn came, looking carefully at the tickets before letting any one enter.

“Einundzwanzig!” (twenty-one), and I passed into the long room and stood before Father Kneipp, like a prisoner at the bar. He is one of the most powerful-looking men I have ever seen; his eyes pierced me through and through. I handed him the book with the diagnosis. He read it, grunted, ruminated, bored me with a second auger glance, then dictated my course of treatment to one of his secretaries, a callow cherico who sat beside him at a long table with three or four other men.

I found out afterwards that they were young doctors studying his methods. Father Kneipp spoke to me rather sharply, going directly to the point. Never mind what he said, I deserved it, I shall not forget it, and, like Dr. Johnson, “I think to mend!” “Come again in a fortnight,” he said suddenly. The consultation was over and I was ushered out. I had not reached the door when “Zweiundzwanzig,” a crippled boy, a far more interesting case than mine, came in.

Father Kneipp dislikes women, ladies especially, me in particular, because no one had warned me not to wear gloves, a veil, and a good bonnet. If I had put an old shawl over my head and looked generally forlorn, he would have been kinder. Isn’t that dear? His benevolence is of the aggressive type; he grudges time spent on rich people,—is only reconciled to them, in fact, because they offer up gifts in return for health, and in this way a great sanitarium has grown up where the prince is nearly as well treated as the peasant—but it is the peasant folk, his own people, that the Pfarrer loves! This is the only truly democratic community I have ever lived in,—a pure democracy governed by a benevolent despot! The despot is past seventy years old; he has an aldermanic figure, a rough peasant head, and extraordinary bristling white eyebrows, standing out a good two inches from his pent-house brows. His coloring is like an old English country squire’s,—brick-red skin, bright blue eyes, and silver hair. He is a prelate; so his rusty black cassock is piped with purple silk, and he wears a tiny purple skull-cap. His two inseparables were with him, a long black cigar and a white Spitz dog....

The fortnight is almost up, the cough gone, the vitality come. Yesterday I went to hear one of the Father’s health talks in the big, open hall, free to all. Good, practical common sense was what he gave us, nothing new or startling,—just the wholesome advice of a very wise old man. Enthusiasm and common sense are his weapons. After it was over we waited to see him come out. A group of bores hung on to him; one sentimentalist caught his hand and tried to kiss it, which so enraged the Pfarrer that he gave the fellow a slap!

Such people! If you could only hear them testify to their cures, like lepers and the halt in the Bible! Tell Anagnos that two blind men say they have been cured here this summer. The applications were general, not local, save bathing the eyes in warm straw water. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One had been blind four years, the other longer. Atrophy of the nerves of the eye was the trouble in both cases. The younger man was going away in despair after a few weeks’ treatment. He drove to the station, got into the train; suddenly he saw something moving, cars going in the other direction! He got out again, returned to Woerishoven, persevered with the treatment, and now sees!

A South African couple sit at my table; they have come all the way from Cape Town. For seventeen long years the husband suffered with nervous dyspepsia, whatever that may be. One summer at Woerishoven has cured him. Does this sound like Paine’s Celery Compound? I learn as much from the other patients as in any other way. Herr Schnell, a German New Yorker,—a hardware man,—and his wife are my best friends. She first spoke to me at table.

“Dot caffee is not good for Ihnen. Sie müssen Wasser trinken.”

“I am here for my throat,” I told her; “I only need hardening; besides, Father Kneipp drinks coffee.”

“Dot Pfarrer is not krank—sick, how you say?”

My dear, she actually sent the coffee away, and forbade the kellner ever to bring it to me again! The Schnells and I patronize the same fruit-stand, and we walk up and down after meals together, eating grapes out of brown paper bags. A certain forlorn Pole at our table interests me; he is called Count Chopski, or some such name. His nerves are shattered by too much cigarette smoking. Frau Schnell and I came upon him in the wood the other day, sitting behind a big tree smoking. Frau Schnell marched up to him, took the cigarette out of his hand, and gave him a scolding for smoking on the sly. He began to cry!

I am at the best hotel, which is of a simplicity! Big people and little people all sit down to the half-past-twelve dinner; only royalties (there are always some of them here) are allowed to keep any state. At the table next mine a bishop and a ballet-dancer sit side by side; it is an open joke to all of us, except the bishop, who doesn’t know, and nobody will tell him,—I call that nice feeling. In all my life I have never met with such simple kindliness as there is here; it’s a sort of Kingdom-come place, where everybody feels responsible for everybody else. Nothing of the am-I-my-brother’s-keeper feeling here! Of course, it is all Pfarrer Kneipp; the whole atmosphere of place and people is the expression of a great, ardent heart which beats for sick humanity, which rages against all shams and cruelties. His spirit is like my father’s, the atmosphere here more like that of the old Institution for the Blind in his day than anything I have ever known.

When Sebastian Kneipp was a young student preparing for the priesthood (he was the son of a poor weaver) his health broke down so completely that he was obliged to give up his studies. One day in a convent library he stumbled on a copy of Preissnitz’s book on water-cure. Impressed by the theory, he persuaded a fellow-student in the same predicament as himself to join him in putting it into practice. It was midwinter. The two lads broke the ice from a neighboring stream in which they took their baths. Heroic treatment, but it saved them; both soon regained their health. Kneipp finished his course of study, took orders, returned to his native village of Woerishoven as parish priest, and has remained here ever since.

From the beginning he seems to have been more interested in curing his parishioners’ bodies than in saving their souls. He tells of being called to administer the last sacrament to a dying man. The moment he saw him he threw away book and candle, called for a pail of water and a linen sheet, put the patient in a wet pack, and saved his life. For many years the Pfarrer only practised among his peasant neighbors. Gradually his fame spread to the surrounding villages, to the city of Munich, to other cities. People began to flock to Woerishoven from all over Germany, France, Europe, America, till finally this obscure Bavarian hamlet has become one of the world’s great Meccas of health.

The only person who makes any effort for society is an Austrian countess, a great court lady. She has taken a tiny cottage, brought her own cook, maid, and butler from Vienna, and tries to give “at homes.” I heard some good music at her rooms the other day. Somehow she had managed to draw together half a dozen people of the sort that can make “society” in the prison of La Jacquerie, on an ocean steamer, or even at a German cure,—an Austrian officer, an English diplomat, a French abbé, my Polish count, and the musician, who is a real artist. We walked with the gods for that hour; the pianist gave us whatever we asked for—Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Grieg. It was a Kaffee-klatsch without the coffee (all stimulants are forbidden, even tea and coffee); the butler handed—scornfully, I thought—milk and grapes. The party broke up rather hurriedly at sunset, everybody rushing away to get their Wassertreten before dark. Water treading is to wade up to one’s knees in one of the streams which run through the fields. Very pleasant, very comic—fortunately, there is a male stream and a female stream; such chippendales! such piano legs have I seen! It is all so strange, so echt deutsch! The countess does not harmonize with the rest, she is out of key. I meet her at seven o’clock in the morning, her feet, head, neck, and arms bare, strolling over the wet grass, a lovely, incongruous vision; her hair dressed and “ondulée” in the latest fashion; her parasol, rose-colored satin. Now, a rose-colored satin parasol at Woerishoven is a false note in a pastoral symphony. She worships Father Kneipp; they all say she owes him her life; he cannot endure her, has attacked her almost openly in his talks; he will not tolerate folly, vanity, or worldliness; she personifies—oh, so charmingly—all three! She wears the prescribed dress of coarse Kneipp linen with such a difference; the other women look like meal-sacks; she has the lines of a Greek goddess.

In the early morning all the patients walk barefoot through the wet grass. Those who have been here longest go without shoes and stockings all day. I am told it is delightful to walk bare foot in the new-fallen snow. Women’s skirts reach only to the ankles; men wear knickerbockers. The only foot-gear allowed at Woerishoven is the leather sandal, classic and comfortable. Newcomers begin by wearing the sandal over the stocking, then the stocking is left off for half an hour—an hour—finally for the whole day. An hour and a half after breakfast and dinner a cold douche is taken. The blitzguss (lightning douche) is for people who have been taking the cure for some time, the rumpf (body) douche is commonly prescribed for new arrivals. At the ladies’ bath attached to this hotel a rosy mädchen plays the hose upon the patient with skill and firmness. That ordeal over, the dripping victim scrambles hastily into her clothes—drying and rubbing are forbidden—and exercises vigorously until she is perfectly dry and warm. The exhilaration which follows is indescribable. In the exercise-room attached to the largest bath, I have seen a bishop capering, a princess sawing wood, a fat American millionaire pirouetting with a balancing pole. No one laughs; it is too grave a matter. You dance or prance, box, saw wood, or do calisthenics for your life—anything to get up the circulation!

Bavaria is enchanting, Bavarians are delightful, not at all like other Germans, more like the Tyrolese,—simple, kind, deeply religious. I cannot imagine becoming a “convert” in Rome, but here it would be easier. Why should the people of Catholic countries have better manners than those of Protestant lands? I know you will bring up some old saw about sincerity and truth not always being compatible with suavity! We can’t be all right and they all wrong, “and yet and yet” it is known that the Pope keeps his own private account at the Bank of Protestant England! Does this mean that he, like the Italians I meet every day, is readier to trust an Englishman or an American than his own countrymen?

I keep thinking of him, my neighbor in Rome, the Prisoner of the Vatican, shut up between the walls of his vast garden through all the long summer. I used to look at his windows and wonder if he felt the heat as much as I did in those last August days before we came away on our villeggiatura. No villeggiatura for him, he is still there! The “Black Pope” (as the power of the Jesuit is called) is his gaoler,—not good King Humbert, as you may have been led to suppose,—but a prison is a prison, whoever the gaoler may be.

I am learning all I can about the German Kaiser. I am inclined to think he plays the strongest game at the European card-table. The Bavarians I have talked with seem rather bored by him; they compare him unfavorably with poor, dear, mad King Ludwig and his father, great art patrons, both.

The Prussians think their Kaiser the greatest man on earth. I gather from one of their number that the court people are harried by him beyond belief; he is forever interfering with their private affairs. A young officer with an English wife and English tastes set up a tandem in Berlin last winter. He received a message from the Emperor requesting him not to drive one horse before the other! How can they bear it? When we first arrived the Kaiser had lately been at Rome and people were still telling stories of him. The Italians are not over-fond of his visits; he costs a great deal to entertain and is too much given to dropping in to tea! He stayed at the Quirinal Palace, the guest of the King. As such, etiquette forbade his visiting the Pope. You don’t suppose he let a little thing like that interfere! On a certain day the German Ambassador to the Vatican (you understand there are two Ambassadors, don’t you, one to the King, one to the Pope?) received notice that the Emperor was to be his guest for the morrow. The Ambassador, a bachelor of simple tastes, prepared for the imperial visit as best he could. The Emperor arrived with a portmanteau, made one of his lightning changes, and came down to breakfast. The breakfast-table was a bright spot, a friend having lent a fine service of silver and some wonderful Venetian glass. When the Kaiser saw the display he cried out, “Mein Gott, A——, where did you steal all these?” Rather nice, wasn’t it? After they had “eated and drinked,” as your children say, a carriage, come all the way from Berlin, with horses, harnesses, and servants to match, drove up to the door and carried the Emperor off to call on the Pope! It would not have been etiquette to use the Italian royal carriage to pay the papal visit!

Prince Doria’s ball for the Kaiser at the splendid Palazzo Doria—one of the finest of the Roman palaces—must have been gorgeous; the picture gallery was a blaze of glory,—you remember there the great Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X.?—all the jewels in Rome were present except the emeralds of the Pope’s tiara. When he went away the Kaiser said to Prince Doria,—

“We shall be very glad to see you and the Princess at Potsdam, but we cannot show you anything like this.” Handsome of him, wasn’t it?

When the Kaiser went sightseeing to St. Peter’s he admired my fountains. Well he might! After watching them leap and play for some time he said, “Turn them off now; it’s a pity to waste so much water.” Thrifty, eh? Turn off Carlo Maderno’s tireless fountains, which have danced in the sun and shimmered in the moon nigh three hundred years!

III
A VISIT TO QUEEN MARGARET

Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, December 7, 1894.

Yesterday was sirocco. In consequence the house was full of fine sand blown up from the African desert and everybody was out of humor; it is curious how this soft wind sets people’s nerves on edge. In spite of sirocco, I saw the King and Queen going to open Parliament. The King, Prince of Naples, and two officers were in the first crystal and gilt coach, the Queen her mother the Duchess of Genoa, and a gentleman of the court in the next. The horses, trappings, coachmen, and footmen were magnificent. There were three servants to each of the six royal carriages—one on the box, two standing behind. They wore scarlet coats, white wigs, three-cornered hats, and pink silk stockings. The King and the Prince were in uniform, the Queen and her mother in the latest French fashion. Little Gwennie Story (the granddaughter of our dear old friends the William Storys) was dreadfully disappointed when she found that the Queen did not always wear a crown. I sympathize with her. I had a place in the loggia of the Palazzo Montecitorio—where Parliament meets—and saw the royalties step out of their carriages and enter the palace.

January 21, 1895.

Yesterday I went to the annual memorial mass for Victor Emmanuel at the Pantheon. The noble old temple—the only one of the Roman buildings which has been in continuous use since it was erected in the first century—was hung with black and cloth of gold. A huge catafalque stood in the middle, directly under the open dome; the whole interior was lighted by classic torches, urns, and tripods holding blue fire. A tribune had been constructed for the orchestra and singers. The music, a mass of Cherubini’s, was very fine. The catafalque was surrounded by a double line of men who stood facing one another through the long service. The men of the outer circle were soldiers of the King, the men of the inner ring were priests of the Church, for Victor Emmanuel was a good Catholic and died in the faith.

I was in Rome for the first time in 1878, the last winter of his life. I often saw him driving on the Pincio or in the Corso. He was an extraordinary-looking man, fierce, powerful, bizarre, every inch a king; loved and hated accordingly. I remember the intense excitement when the two old enemies, Pius the Ninth and Victor Emmanuel, both lay dying in the city for which they had fought. Would the King be permitted to receive the sacrament? When it was known that the Pope on his death-bed had sent his blessing to the King in extremis all Rome drew a long breath. We went to see Il Re Galantuomo lying in state in the capella ardente at the Quirinal. He was dressed in full uniform with high riding-boots, the royal robe of red velvet and ermine was spread over the inclined plane on which he lay, the crown and sceptre at his feet. The chapel blazed with candles; in each of the four corners knelt a brown Capuchin monk telling his beads. Signor Simone Peruzzi, chamberlain to the King, watched one night beside the body. He was alone for the moment when he heard a deep sigh, saw the King’s breast heave. The matter was explained by the physicians afterwards. I remember to this day the thrill in Peruzzi’s voice when he spoke of the dead King’s sigh.

March 10, 1895.

Mrs. Potter Palmer and I have had a private audience with the Queen. The visit went off very well. We arrived at the Quirinal Palace at two o’clock, and were received by the Marchesa Villamarina and two other court ladies, with whom we talked for perhaps ten minutes. A tiny old woman dressed in mourning, looking like the Fairy Blackstick, came out from her audience just as we entered the Queen’s reception-room for ours. She must have been a privileged person, for we had been warned not to wear black and not to wear hats, bonnets being de rigueur. As I do not own a bonnet, Mrs. Palmer kindly lent me a charming one, fresh from Paris—a few days later, when she was received by the Pope, she wore my Spanish mantilla. The Queen, who was seated on a sofa, rose as we entered and shook hands cordially with us. She is still beautiful, her hair magnificent, her eyes kind and keen. When you visit royalty you must only speak when you are spoken to; the choice of the topic of conversation thus remains with the royal personage. You must always say “your Majesty,” and you must make three reverences on entering and leaving the presence. In all this, I was tutored by Marion Crawford, who has often been “received,” and whose books the Queen is said to read with pleasure. She speaks English perfectly, by the way. She had seen an article in a late magazine—The Century, I think—on American country houses; she spoke of those at Newport, and said that, “judging from the illustrations, they must be very fine.” She showed us a grand piano at the end of the room, saying that it was an American instrument, a Steinway, and that “it had a very brilliant action.” With Mrs. Palmer the Queen spoke of the World’s Fair. Mr. MacVeagh had presented her with a copy of the book I edited on the Woman’s Department of the Chicago Exposition. The audience lasted about twenty minutes; then the Queen rose, the signal for us to withdraw. We made our three courtesies and backed successfully from the room. The Queen is much beloved; she has real charm, besides being good and clever.

Yesterday I went to Mr. William Story’s studio. The garden is lovelier than ever, the climbing vines that mask the dead wall make a rustling screen of cool green in which the birds build their nests. I waited in the studio among the statues—most of them old friends of mine—and found my particular tassel on the fringed robe of the marble Sardanapalus. One day, seventeen years ago, when Mr. Story was working on the clay, he let me take his modelling tool and add a few touches to the fringe. I have seen a copy of this statue in Lord Battersea’s fine house in London opposite the Marble Arch of Hyde Park. When Mr. Story came in—much as you remember him, the same graceful, brilliant talker, only with a new pensive note since his wife’s death—we talked of the old days at Dieppe, of the meetings in the studio there, when he and my mother read aloud from the books they were writing, and Mrs. Story gave us tea and read us Mallock’s “New Republic,” published that year; it must have been the summer of 1878. Mr. Story remembered the mornings on the plage when we sat on the warm sea sand under big red umbrellas watching “the boys” tumbling in the surf, and mamma’s calling Waldo “the amber god,” and Julian “a young leopard,” as he swam and dove through the waves like a merman. I reminded him of the little poem he wrote in our autograph book, and showed him the locket Mrs. Story gave me with a picture of herself and Pippa, the funny little pug dog she took with her wherever she went. We both remembered how Pippa behaved the day they left Dieppe when she saw the handbag in which she always travelled. She bit and scratched the bag, whined and generally remonstrated. Once inside the satchel, however, she was perfectly quiet and never betrayed her presence by barking en route.

Mr. Story showed me the monument he is modelling for Mrs. Story’s grave—a kneeling figure of an angel leaning over a classic altar. The face, every line of the figure, every finger of the hand, each feather of the drooping wings seems to weep. He calls it the Genius of Grief. This last expression of a great life love gripped me by the heart. It is to be placed in the Protestant cemetery here (where lovely Jennie Crawford is buried) not far from the corner where the ashes of Shelley were interred, and near the tombstone of Keats with its familiar inscription,—

“Here lies one whose name is writ in water.”

St. Agnello di Sorrento, March 18, 1895.

Last Monday we left Rome in a rain-storm and came here to break up a pair of obstinate colds. We are delightfully established at the Cocumella, an old Jesuit monastery turned into a hotel. There is less of what Hawthorne calls the odor of sanctity—a peculiar mildewed smell the monks leave behind them—than is usual in such places. Our windows command an astonishing view of the Bay of Naples and Mt. Vesuvius. To the right, about a quarter of a mile away, is Villa Crawford, where we are most kindly welcomed by the ladies; the man of the house is away. The children are charming; the villa ideal; it stands on the edge of a high cliff leaning over the sea. The grounds, filled with flowers and fruit-trees, are seamed with quaintly paved walks. On the left of the house is a terrace, where they dine in summer. Here a flaming heart in gray and white paving-stones took my fancy. The house is large and luxurious; there are roses everywhere inside and out.

To-day is Palm Sunday. The chambermaid who brings my morning coffee brought me a bit of olive-branch, instead of palm, from early service. Later we went to high mass at the cathedral in Sorrento. The procession was headed by the bishop, his acolytes, and some smart young canons in rose-colored satin capes. After the mass the procession marched through the town, led by a group of bronzed fishermen and boys dressed in white robes, with bright blue moiré capes, and loose oriental white hoods over their heads. They all carried yellow palm branches in their hands. It was the most perfect contrast of color imaginable.

Yesterday I saw the nets hauled in. The men and women, old and young, form a line upon the beach, take hold upon the rope, and with a graceful, swinging motion pull in the seine inch by inch, as they did in the days of St. Peter. The Sorrentines are a handsome and seem a kindly people; there are comparatively few beggars here.

Throughout the Piano di Sorrento thousands of men and women are employed in the manufacture of silk stockings, scarfs, carved and inlaid wood, coral ornaments, tortoise-shell combs, and jewelry. I dare not enter a shop for fear of temptation. The Italian spoken is far pleasanter than the nasal Neapolitan; the chief peculiarity is the dropping of the final vowel. Maria, the dark-eyed chambermaid, asks if she shall make the lett, for letto (bed), and speaks of Sorrent, doman, and Sabad, meaning Sorrento, domani (to-morrow), and Sabato (Saturday).

The trees in the garden are laden with oranges and lemons, the feast of the roses is beginning, the birds are singing. The service of the hotel is excellent, the table quite good enough, our room has a fireplace and afternoon sun; for all this, food and wine included, we pay six francs—one dollar and twenty cents—a day, with permission to roam in the garden and pick as many oranges and roses as we like. I am reminded of Hugh Norman’s saying, “When I have only a dollar and a half a day left to live on, I shall retire to the Cocumella and pass the rest of my life there.” We have uva secca for luncheon, grapes dipped in wine and spices, rolled up with bits of citron in grape-leaves, tied in little bundles, and roasted. They may be kept half the year, and are among the dainties of the world. The miniature Italian count who married Mrs. Tom Thumb, veuve, said when he came to take tea at our house, “In Italia si mangia bene (In Italy one eats well).” He was right; we hear less about Italian than about French cookery, but it is quite as good—the range of dishes is wider and shows more imagination. There is a great deal about cooking in my letters; so there is in life. Fire, cookery, and civilization seem to be inseparable. Speaking of fire, the women about here say that Vesuvius, across the bay there, sets a bad example smoking his eternal pipe. The men sit watching him, presently they imitate him, and try and see how big a cloud of smoke they can make.

Vesuvius dominates the whole landscape. He finally got the better of us, drew us like a magnet; so, finding that the ascent can be made from here as well as anywhere, we gave a day to it. The road, an ascending spiral, embraces the great black mountain like the coils of a serpent. At first it leads through pleasant vineyards; when these are left behind the dreadful lava fields begin. The weird forms of the petrified rivers of lava, once red and molten, now grim and black, suggest human bodies writhing in the clutch of horrid monsters. Here a huge trunk madly wrenches itself from the toils, there a vast body lies supine and agonized, the last resistance passed. When we left our carriage at the foot of the funicular railway, I felt I had passed through several circles of the Inferno. Dante must have received many of the impressions he transmits to us from Vesuvius. At the summit, when I looked down into the crater, at the slippery, slimy sides, with their velvet bloom of sulphur, I saw where the fathers of the Church and the early painters, Fra Angelico among them, got their ideas of hell. Marcus Aurelius, my guide, bibulous, muscular, with a grip of iron, found a point from which, when the wind lifted the veil of thick white smoke, I could, by leaning well over the crater, see the flood at the bottom surge, seethe, toss up from its depth big, red-hot stones, which dropped back again while the mountain roared and scolded. It was an awesome day. Vesuvius has given me not only a new understanding of the poetry and religion of Italy, but of the volcanic Italian character, which it surely has had a share in forming. On our way down we ran over a soldier, the front wheel of our carriage passing across his leg. As we were three people in the carriage, it must have hurt him, but he got up and walked nimbly off, cursing us vehemently. I wish the Abyssinians might find the Italian soldiers equally invincible in Africa.

St. Agnello di Sorrento, Easter Sunday, 1895.

I find the services of Holy Week more impressive here than in Rome. Thursday afternoon, on a lonely road by the sea, we heard a strange, primitive chanting,—the music might have been Palestrina’s,—and came suddenly upon a procession led by children carrying the usual emblems of the Passion, and some I have never seen before. The story of the betrayal and the crucifixion was told by symbols, the basin of Pilate, the cock and sword of Peter, the bag of Judas, the scourge, the pillar, the spear, the sponge, the cross, the hammer and nails, the crown of thorns, and the winding-sheet. The washing of the apostles’ feet at the cathedral Holy Thursday was really moving. A dozen poor old fishermen, scrubbed as clean as possible, represented the twelve; they were each rewarded by a loaf of bread and a franc at the end of the service. Early Good Friday morning, before the sun was up, a band of peasants passed through the town bearing a life-sized image of the Madonna dressed all in white, going out to look for her son. After sundown they returned, bringing back the mother from her search, clad in mourning robes. She had found her son; behind her the figure of the dead Christ was carried on a bier. The people stood gravely watching the bearers as they passed through the dark, torch-lit streets. On Saturday, as we were driving, a cannon sounded at twelve o’clock in token of the resurrection. Our driver threw himself from the cab and, touching his head to the ground three times, remained kneeling long enough to repeat several aves.

Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, March 27, 1895.

We were glad to get back to Rome, and to the terrace, where the wall-flowers are out, and daffodils, pansies, primroses, forget-me-nots, and lilies-of-the-valley. Two large lilac-bushes and three spiræa will be in bloom by Sunday. There is snow on the Leonessa; it is a trifle chilly up here on the terrace where I write, but it is near “peaks and stars” and very near peace. I weed the flowers, and collect the snails that prey upon our pansies and threaten our roses. The awful gardens where Nero’s living torches flamed lay just below my windows, where the Piazza of St. Peter’s is now. Soracte, the Leonessa, with all the rest of the purple Alban hills, looked down on that sight as calmly as they look on my lilies and me. There is no place in the world where one feels so small as in Rome. The sunflowers come up, each with his little burst shell of seed on his head, which he soon throws away; so the lesson of the new life springing from the old is studied in the shadow of Angelo’s dome. The great church greeted me like a friend. Tourists criticise the architecture: I do not deny faults, I only do not see them.

We have a nightingale of our own at last. His name is Pan. He sings gloriously. What a thrill his voice has! We feed him on bullock’s heart. Jeremy Bentham, the tortoise, knew me; he never was so friendly before; he now snaps fresh lettuce-leaves out of my hand without trying to nip my fingers. Our great Thomas cat threatened Pan, and my life was a constant struggle to keep them apart, so I have sent Pan to the studio, where J. has a falcon and two pigeons. He threatens to buy a jackdaw, and was with difficulty restrained from purchasing a baby fox. It was such an engaging little animal that I confess to have wanted it myself. The happy family at the studio is cared for by Vincenzo, a young painter, a scholar of J.’s. In the old days, when J. was a pupil of Villegas, Vincenzo was the studio boy who washed their brushes. J. thinks he has some talent and has given him a whole floor in his great barrack of a studio.

Pompilia and Filomena had swept and garnished the house with flowers in honor of our return. All our friends and our small world of hangers-on (the ancient Romans called them clients) welcomed us kindly, with the single exception of the porter.

Porters seem to be natural enemies, like mothers-in-law. We all know shining exceptions, but the rule commonly holds good of both. None of our friends are on speaking terms with their porters. Our old porter was dreadful—dirty, drunk, disreputable. At first the new one seemed a treasure. J. had recommended him for the place chiefly on account of his lovely tenor voice. The man—we call him Ercole “because it is his name”—used to sit at work (he is a mender of leather) on the sidewalk opposite the studio singing airs from the latest operas, Bohême, Pagliacci, Iris, but singing them like an artist. It helped J., shut up at his work in the big studio, to hear him, and in a reckless moment he spoke to Signor Mazzocchi about the singing saddler. Behold him installed with his big, white-haired wife, Maria, his little daughter, Lucrezia, brown and bonnie, in a grim room without light or air (you would not put a cat in such a hole)—still, an improvement on their former quarters. The landlord is responsible for the porter’s wages. We give him a mancia of ten francs a month, extras for extra service, and a present at Christmas and at Easter. His duty towards us is to receive our cards and letters and bring them up the three long flights of stairs. Our mail grew staler and staler. The Paris New York Herald (read by all Americans in Europe), instead of being served with breakfast, arrived barely in time for luncheon. J. had built on the first landing a little open stall, light and airy, where Ercole could stitch his old saddles and harnesses and sing his jolly songs. Alas and alas! there is a wine-shop opposite the palace, there is a trattoria on the ground floor next the baker’s; both proprietors are generous and soft-hearted. Somehow the fat wife, the slim daughter, are fed, but Ercole stitches no longer, sings no more. Sober and poor, a rival to Pan. Rich and drunk, he is sourly silent. It is a dangerous thing to play at being providence! The postino now brings up the mail and delivers it at our door, ultimo piano (top floor).

February, 1896.

Last week I took Isabel to a ball at the Princess del Drago’s. We have kept Ercole up at night a good deal lately, so I took the key of the big portone and told him that he need not wait for us. Isabel’s maid, Franceline, was to sit up and open the old green door of our apartment the key of which weighs two pounds and will not go into my pocket. We wore our very best gowns and trinkets, and Isabel had a pretty tinsel ribbon in her hair which sparkled like diamonds. It was a great dance; the drive home at three in the morning under a full silver moon, past Hilda’s tower, the fountain of the Triton, and the hospital of Santo Spirito was as far as I was concerned not the least of the fun. We met a few empty cabs returning to their stables, and just as we entered the Borgo Nuovo we passed a pair of grave carabinieri (military police) pacing their beat, wrapped in long black cloaks, their three-cornered hats drawn over their eyes. Our good coachman Cesare opened the portone, found and lighted the candle left on the lower step, as had been arranged, and bade us good-night. We picked up our skirts and went up the two easy flights chattering about the party. At the second landing we stopped beside the Etruscan ladies to rest before breasting the third short, steep flight. I rang softly, not to disturb the sleepers, and waited. I rang loudly, and waited. Through the door came a gentle, familiar murmur. Then the cracked bell rang out a tocsin that should have roused the whole palace; still no sound from within save that rhythmical murmur; we beat and kicked upon the door till hands and feet were tired; we called, bellowed, screamed, shrieked for a matter of five minutes, until the terrified Franceline, guilty yet denying sleep, threw open the door. I was just dropping off into dreamland when I heard the portone shut heavily. As the stairway belongs exclusively to us, I sat up and listened. There was a hubbub on the stairs. I heard Ercole’s voice protesting, calling upon the Trinity first as a whole, then severally, upon all the saints, last and loudest upon the Madonna, to witness his innocence. A stern, accusing voice drowned Ercole’s. I threw on a wrapper, ran to the door, and listened.

“Where are they, then? Make me to see them, those ladies, all festive with jewels. Did we not ourselves behold them enter this portone, laughing and talking gaily? this portone, brute beast, of which one knows that thou, and thou only, hast the key. Did we not hear, we out in the street, feminine yells horrible, to make one tremble, and thou sayest thou heardst nothing? Animal, where are they, then? What have you done with them, those ladies so bright, so beautiful? Robbed, murdered, dying, perhaps—possibly dead.”

“By the mass, by Peter and Paul, I was asleep in my bed at ten o’clock. Ask Maria, ask Lucrezia, ask the padrone of the wine-shop, who turned me out at that hour. I knew nothing till you came, illustrissimi, you tore me from my bed. What do I know of the ladies? I saw them go at quarter before eleven with Cesare in a coupé. Is it sensible to ask me? Ask that fat pig, Cesare. If they are dead, he is responsible.”

“Might it not be well to ring the bell and ask the signore?” said a third voice, that of the elder carabiniere. Explanations, apologies, thanks, “e buona notte!”

February 4, 1897.

The ball at the embassy last night (given by Mr. MacVeagh, the retiring American Ambassador, for the King and Queen) went off very well. Her Majesty looked charming and danced the quadrille with great spirit. Some of the dancers forgot the figures, she put them all straight, and was so winning, so fascinating that the Americans were enthusiastic about her.

The King, who does not dance, seemed bored. He is first and above all else a soldier, a man of action. I watched him as he stood pulling his big mustachios, talking to an ancient ambassadress; by his expression it was easy to see he would be glad when it was over and time to go home. He was in uniform as usual, carrying his white-plumed helmet under his arm. His honest face had that puzzled look it so often wears; no wonder! Of all the monarchs in the world, his riddles are the hardest to read. The Queen wore a superb dress of pale blue satin with point lace and her famous pearls. The King gave her a string of pearls on each anniversary of their marriage, it is said, till at their silver wedding she protested she could not bear the weight of another rope. The finest jewels after the royal pearls were Mrs. Potter Palmer’s. She wore the crown of pearls and diamonds I remember her wearing at her reception for the Spanish Infanta Eulalia at the time of the World’s Fair at Chicago. The supper was served in an immense room, the handsomest in the apartment, which occupies the piano nobile of the Palazzo Ludovisi. Nothing could be better arranged for entertaining in the grand manner than the present American Embassy. You enter an enormous anticamera, where the servants take your wraps, pass on through a second waiting-room into a long corridor which runs the whole length of the palace. The state rooms all lead from this corridor; they have communicating doors, so that standing in the doorway of the supper-room one looks through the two drawing-rooms to the ballroom, where on a stage the musicians are seated. The diplomats all wore court dress. A ball where the men as well as the women are splendid is naturally far more brilliant than one of our balls, where the girls monopolize the finery. The most striking figure there was the military attaché of the Russian embassy. He wore the dress of a Cossack colonel, cartridge belt, jewelled weapons, and all, and—as if to heighten the warlike look—a black patch over one eye. The tender-hearted regarded him with sympathy: “poor man, in what dreadful encounter with savage tribesmen had he lost the missing eye?” Worse luck yet! It was knocked out by the point of an umbrella carelessly handled by a lady in getting out of the travelling compartment of a train!

I never saw such a crowd around a supper-table. Refreshments at most entertainments here are simpler than would be believed at home. In this the Italians are more civilized than the English or ourselves. The supper last night was of the generous American order. The Romans seemed to enjoy it and did not limit themselves to biscuits and lemonade. The army officers in especial took kindly to the good things.

To-day I looked into St. Agostino and saw the beautiful miracle-working Madonna. She is a lovely marble woman with a less lovely bambino. The mother is literally covered with gems; she has strings upon strings of pearls about her neck, her fingers are laden to the very tips with rings; the child is hung with scores of watches. Both heads are deformed with ugly crowns. The Madonna is by Jacopo Sansovino, a Florentine sculptor of the fifteenth century. She is much adored and quite adorable. She is very rich, has a good income of her own from the various legacies she has received. On the pedestal below her silver foot—the marble one was long since kissed out of existence—an inscription states that “on the assurance of Pius the Seventh an indulgence of two hundred days will be granted to whoever shall devoutly touch the foot of this holy image and recite an ave.”

The Madonna of St. Agostino

From a photograph

I also went to see the appartamento Borgia, newly opened at the Vatican. It contains one of the most splendid pieces of decoration I have ever seen—three rooms painted by Pinturicchio; they have been closed for twenty years, having been used as libraries; the walls were covered with books. The Pope has gone to great expense to put them in order, and has thrown them open to the public. Artistic Rome has gone mad about them. They surpass everything in the way of decoration here save the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze of Raphael.

June 29 and 30, 1897.

To-night the Feast of St. Peter is to be celebrated by a dinner-party on the terrace. That old statue of Jupiter in the great church across the way,—now held venerable as a portrait of St. Peter—is dressed in his best vestments, his finest tiara, and wears his most sumptuous sapphire ring on his stiff forefinger. As the whole Borgo is under the protection of St. Peter, I always make a little feast on his day. There are many sermons preached about him; I heard an excellent one in a neighboring church. The object of the saints’ days is to keep alive the memory of noble lives. Just as on Washington’s Birthday the old stories of Valley Forge and Yorktown are recited year after year, so the story of Peter is told on the 29th of June every year. I was surprised to hear Signor Rodolfo Lanciani say he thought it possible St. Peter had actually been in Rome, and that in his opinion the great church may cover his last resting-place as well as perpetuate his name.

Ripe figs are supposed to be eaten first on St. John’s Day, the 24th of June. Tradition says that the first plate of figs was always presented on that day to Pope Pius the Ninth. Either figs are late this season or Pompilia has been slow about finding them, for the purple figs which were served with cold boiled ham for our luncheon to-day are the first we have seen this season. Naturally there was no second course to such a superlative first. The terrace dinner was a great success. The table was set under the pergola covered thick with the second crop of roses. We hung lucerne (brass lamps for burning olive oil) from the yellow canes of the crossed bamboos and lighted the farther end of our airy dining-room with colored lanterns. Among the guests were Monsignor William O’Connell, director of the American College, a genial Irish-American priest, and Dr. William Bull, physician to the American Embassy, guide, philosopher, and friend of all wandering Americans. He is beloved of artists, a collector of antiquities, a genial, not a melancholy Dane, a wise physician, and one of the most picturesque figures in our Roman world. The sun was still staining the sky when we sat down. By the time old Nena brought the ices from the trattoria below, the full yellow moon came up over the Sabine Hills, flooding every corner with its yellow light. Below, in the baker’s shop, the nightingale sang to the roses. Our best rose, il Capitano Christi, is a very large, flat, pink rose, growing on a stiff stalk with long, fierce thorns. It opens wide as a saucer, and is of the most rapturous, tender color. It is grafted on an excellent commonplace red rose-tree, a generous and prolific bloomer, which yields a brave harvest, the first to blossom, the last to wither, always to be depended on if I want roses in a hurry. The Captain gives a rare rose, never more than one at a time, but I know that it is to the Captain’s rose that the baker’s nightingale sings.

IV
A PRESENTATION TO LEO THE THIRTEENTH

Palazzo Rusticucci, November 20, 1897.

Our mother, comfortably established in the guest-room under the protection of Apollo, already feels at home in Rome. In the morning she sits on the terrace in a grand hooded chair we had made for her in that haunt of basket-makers, the Vicolo dei Canestrari—the little street of the basket-makers—are not the names of the Roman streets delightful? After luncheon we drive on the Pincio when the band plays, in the Doria or the Borghese Villa, or, best of all, on the Campagna. She shall have enough out-of-doors this winter! For a hundred years English doctors have sent elderly people to Rome, “where the effect of the air on the heart’s action tends to increase longevity.” The old here are uncommonly frisky. Mr. Greenough, an octogenarian, trots up our stairs as if he were twenty. On stormy days the mother drives to

The Pincian Gate and Wall of Rome

From a photograph

St. Peter’s and takes her walk inside the church. It is so vast that it has a climate of its own, varying only ten degrees in temperature during the entire year, consequently it is warm in winter and cool in summer. In August I put on a wrap when I go over there; in January I take off my furs! Socially as well as climatically Rome is an ideal place for the old; that horrid topic, age, is properly ignored. I have seen a gentleman of seventy-nine waltzing at a ball with a partner not twenty years his junior. The example of the Pope—always an old man—may have something to do with this admirable energy of the elders; the age of the civilization probably counts for more.

Do not believe what the papers say about the Pope; he is likely to live for years. Eighty-seven is the prime of life for pontiffs. Leo the Thirteenth serves the Italian newspaper men and foreign correspondents as the sea-serpent serves ours. When news is scarce, when the rich and great are veiled from the public eye by reason of summer seclusion or wandering, that blessed serpent, sailing into the sea of ink, saves the situation. The reports of Sua Santita’s failing health used to rouse my sympathy; now they only make me angry, because they hurt his poor old feelings. He once said, on reading an account of his approaching end in a Roman paper, “Why do they wish me dead?”

Was not that pathetic? In spite of being White in my politics, I feel a personal sympathy for the Pope. We are such near neighbors, I see the windows of his private apartment from the terrace; we both look down upon the piazza of St. Peter’s; we have the same surgeon (Dr. Bull took me to consult Mazzoni about a bicycle ankle); I know several of his chamberlains; we both are left behind when the hot weather drives the beau monde out of Rome for the summer: you see, we have much in common; his not knowing it does not alter my feelings; it’s one-sided, like a book friendship. I was in Rome when Pius the Ninth died and Leo the Thirteenth was elected. I remember how handsome Pius looked lying in state, with his foot in such a position that his red slipper (it had a cross embroidered on it) could be kissed. I do not remember much about the coronation ceremonies, but I have a very clear impression of my presentation to Pope Leo in the winter of 1878, very soon after he became Pope. The mother refused to go: those stubborn Protestant knees would not bow down to Baal or to the Pope. Our generation takes things differently, not half so picturesquely. We say, “An old man’s blessing is a good thing to have, whether he be a lama from Thibet or a priest of Rome.” Two other young American girls went with me; there were, all told, perhaps twenty people presented that day. We wore black, with such diamonds as our mothers would lend us, and Spanish mantillas. A few minutes before the Pope entered a chamberlain made us all kneel; then Leo, dressed in white, with a heavy gold chain around his neck, from which hung a cross set with emeralds, made the tour of the room, stopping to speak to every one. The chamberlain mentioned our names and nationality, the Pope asked each of us to what church we belonged. My place was next an emotional convert; he hardly noticed her, merely giving her his blessing and passing on. He asked me where I came from, said Boston was a famous city, inquired how long I had been in Rome, wished me a pleasant journey, and a safe return to my people. He spoke longest to a little Jewess who was at my left—on the principle, I suppose, that we already have our friends, and should make friends of our enemies. We kissed his ring—a large amethyst—as we had been told, not his hand. I am not sure whether it was Pope Leo or Pius the Ninth who always asked strangers how long they had been in Rome. When the answer indicated that the stay had been for days or weeks, he said in parting “Addio,” when it had been months, “Arriverderci”—au revoir,—“because if you have been here only a short time, you may not return, but if you have been here for months, you are sure to come back.” I have heard it told of both; it very likely dates back to Gregory the Sixteenth. Stories are immortal in Rome, those from the “Gesta Romanorum” being still current.

December 27, 1897.

Oh! the terrace, the terrace! with the white hyacinths ablow, little starry bunches of narcissi, pansies, a rare rose, and the yellow gourds of the passion-flower hanging down through the crossed bamboos of the trellis. Our mother feels the fascination of the terrace life more and more. Yesterday she asked me to buy her a small watering-can,—ours are huge,—and to-day she helped water the plants and weed the tulips. I put the pots up on the wall for her where she could easily reach them, and she pulled out the tender weeds with her beautiful hands. Bulbs do not thrive so well the second year as the first. The delirium of the hyacinths is gone with that precious burst of youth. This season they bloom soberly; no more passionate, lavish giving, they have left that behind,—like some other flowers,—but they do their little, middle-aged best. We had a merry Christmas. The weather was perfect: a gift, the first and best of all, of a clear, bracing morning. “Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” No emperor being at hand, we went to St. Peter’s, walked up and down the side aisles, had just a whiff of the high mass, Cardinal Rampolla officiating, the Pope’s angel singing the soprano part phenomenally. His voice has a peculiar soaring quality; it seems to scale the heights and knock at the door of heaven.

We met Boston society, as we always do when we go to St. Peter’s,—an old friend and his bride, and a pair of pleasant Beacon Street neighbors.

February 11, 1898.

J. says “Rome is always festering (festa-ing).” Between saints’ days, national holidays, and our own private celebrations there are rather too many festivities. It is a pretty custom they have here of celebrating the feast of the patron saint rather than the birthday. The embarrassing question, “How old?” is thus avoided. It is also convenient. On the feast of Santa Lucia I am reminded to go and see Lucia di Villegas and carry her a bunch of flowers. I am sure to find Villino Villegas swept and garnished, the signora dressed in her best, all smiles and sweetness. She has been to mass and is ready to receive friends and relatives. Anglo-Saxons are fond of saying that the home does not exist in Latin lands. This is not quite true. In Italy the home is less a social centre and more a family stronghold than with us. An outsider is admitted to it only as the last test of friendship. It has still a touch of oriental feeling. It is the place where the women belong, where they mostly stay; it is jealously guarded from strangers—from strange men especially; “chi va piano va sano!”

Wednesday, the anniversary of our wedding-day, was one long frolic. At nine we went up to our play-house and played with our flower dolls. In the evening we had a little dinner of intimates. Filomena arranged a large horseshoe in double violets and pansies between J.’s place and mine at table “for good luck.” In the morning she brought me a basket of fresh eggs from her people in the country and wished me “cento di questi giorni (a hundred of these days).” Even Pompilia, the cook, who has been rather cross lately, gave us two paper fans. In the kitchen a fiascone of wine and a huge panettone were on tap; everybody who passed that way drank our health. After dinner we sat over the fire till past midnight telling ghost stories or listening to J. C. (the Muse of Via Gregoriana), who played divinely to us. It was a good day.

We do not have much music worth hearing in Rome, so we doubly enjoy what the gods send us. Sgambati’s concert last week began with that adorable overture to Fingal’s Cave. Cotogni, an old singer (sixty-eight is old to sing in concerts), sang well with the remains of a glorious bass voice which he handled like a delicate soprano. He is just back from St. Petersburg, where he has been the director of the Conservatory for twenty years. I heard him again at Mme. Patti’s concert. They sang “la ci darem la mano” from “Don Giovanni,” which they had last sung together in their early youth. The gallant manner in which the old singer handed out the diva was very nice. Mme. Patti is here on a wedding-tour with her husband,—Baron Cedarstrom,—a young Swede twenty-eight years old, who used to take care of her throat. She wore a pretty lilac dress which smelt of Paris and the Rue de la Paix.

Signor Sgambati is responsible for the best music we have. He is a true musician, a delightful composer, and the most enchanting person. Of course you know his compositions; the Boston Orchestra lately gave his symphony. Some time ago he was on the point of leaving Rome for London, where they were on their knees for him to come: the musical people and critics were waiting with open arms to receive him. He went to the station, weighed his luggage, bought his ticket, was just about to get on the train, when he realized that he was leaving Rome! That was more than he had bargained for! It was one thing to go to London, another to leave Rome! He calmly returned to his quiet house and his piano in the Via della Croce, and has remained there ever since, the friend of the Queen, of all true artists, of every starving musical genius brought to his notice. That such a man should endure the drudgery of giving music lessons is a fearful waste of fine material; the musical world should make him independent, as it made Wagner.

If you only stay long enough in Rome you meet everybody you ever heard of: all the world comes here sooner or later. The best thing about the social life is its cosmopolitan quality. Among the people we see most are a Greek woman (I had almost written goddess), a Dutchman, a Swede, a Dane, a Turk, an Irish priest, and a French Protestant pastor. American Protestant houses are no-man’s-land, neutral ground: we have visitors of every faith and of all parties. One Sunday afternoon Mrs. Agassiz, the President of Radcliffe College, Mr. Peabody, the Master of Croton School, and Mgr. O’Connell, the Director of the American College for young priests in Rome, chanced to meet at tea in my salon. There are a dozen different cliques, all more or less linked together—artistic, musical, political, sporting. The people who form “smart” society seem to me more cultivated than is usual with that class.

We have lately returned from an old-furniture hunt at Viterbo. We found no furniture, but the most picturesque Roman Gothic town I have seen. When I first knew Italy Viterbo had a bad name for brigands. The railroad has been open only four years; I hear no more of brigands, though I suspect several of my Viterbo acquaintances once belonged to the band. The place is not yet tourist stricken. We slept in a grim caravansary and went to a villanous trattoria for our meals, where we were poisoned by the food. A twenty-four-hour fast brought us again into condition. Viterbo is a gray fourteenth-century town with massive stone walls and turrets. It has many handsome buildings, some fair pictures, good Etruscan and Roman antiquities, but the most admirable thing about it is its wonderful completeness. Everything hangs together architecturally, the parts are subservient to the whole, the result—grace, harmony, repose! Shall we ever learn the trick?

From Viterbo we drove to the estate of the Duke of Lante, one of the most famous Italian villas. The present duke has an American mother and wife. We had a letter of introduction from a mutual friend. All the grown-up people of the family were absent. We were received by two tiny fairies in pink calico, who took us each by a hand and led us through the garden to see the oaks, the famous bronze fountain, and the interesting house. I never have had so lovely an escort or a kinder welcome than the little ladies of the Villa Lante gave us.

February 26, 1898.

You will like to hear about a day of pure delight. I left home, duty, and family, and went off with Donna Primavera for an outing at Ostia. We started at ten in the morning, returned at six at night. I had been there before on my bicycle—it is a capital road—but on that occasion I saw nothing except the view. Ostia is an ancient Roman commercial town founded by Ancus Martius, the fourth of the Roman kings; that takes it back to the sixth century B.C. The ruins of Ostia are on the banks of the Tiber. From here the fleets of merchant galleys sailed away to Greece and Africa. I felt that I was penetrating into the business life of the Romans as never before. Of course, I knew vaguely that there was a great commerce underlying the whole vast scheme, supporting the army and the art, but I was not prepared for the illumination I received in wandering through the old warehouses, where we found rows of vast amphoræ (earthenware jars) which had contained wine, oil, and grain. Trade was as important in the time of Augustus as in the days of McKinley. The fleets that sailed into the harbor of Ostia brought nothing more precious than the marbles from Paros and Africa. It is said of Augustus that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The threshold of the temple at Ostia is a single slab of africano sixteen feet long, delicious in color—rose, gray, and black blended in the most adorable mottlings. Signor Lanciani tells me they have lately discovered a large cargo of precious marbles at or near Ostia which has been lying waiting perhaps two thousand years for the hand of the builder. I should like to have a piece of it. In Rome one learns to appreciate marbles. I point out the different varieties to all the friends from home whom I pilot about the city (there are plenty of them), and it is a rare thing to find one who knows the difference between cipollino and serpentino. Tell that to the Kindergartnerins!

April 16, 1898.

Waked up at dawn this morning by the rattling of cabs and carriages and the footsteps of sixty thousand people going to St. Peter’s to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the Pope’s coronation. I had not meant to go,—these functions are such an old story to me,—but I could not resist the magnetism of the crowd. The Borgo and the Piazza were black with people. Before the obelisk a double cordon of troops stretched across the whole Piazza—government troops, you understand; the government keeps order when the Pope goes to St. Peter’s and is responsible for his safety. The Borgo is perhaps the safest place to live in that exists; I have never heard of any other so carefully guarded. Inside the Vatican the Papal troops keep order. At a certain point behind the church two sentinels pace their beat, the spot where they meet marking the line of the exterritorial limits of the Vatican. One sentinel wears the King’s uniform, the other wears the Pope’s; they appear to be on friendly terms.

My ticket admitted me to the bronze door. The crush going up the steps was terrific; once inside the church, all was well. I never have known a panic or a stampede in all the many crowds I have seen gather in the great church across the way. In the days of the Cæsars the Romans learned how to behave at a great pageant; they have never forgotten the lesson. The Roman crowd is the best behaved and most good-natured in the world. Of course, there are always people who feel the effects of being in such a crush; I saw three women faint and one man “tumble in a fit” to-day. They were immediately carried to one of the hospitals fitted up in various parts of the building on all such occasions. It happened once that a child was born in St. Peter’s while a great function was going on—I think it was a beatification.

An aisle was kept open, by means of movable benches, leading from the Chapel of the Sacrament, which communicates with the Vatican, to the papal throne, placed to-day for the first time since 1870 under the chair of St. Peter at the end of the basilica. The walls were hung with miles of crimson velvet and brocade. I like the church better plain, but it made a “soomptuous melée” of color. I saw the Crown Princess of Sweden and the Countess of Trani, sister of the Empress of Austria, in the tribune reserved for royal guests. The costumes of the papal court are simply enchanting. The red and yellow uniform of the Swiss Guard never palls; it was designed by Michael Angelo, who had some taste. The chamberlains, some of whom we know, looked so handsome in black velvet doublets and knee breeches, with stiff white ruffs and thick gold chains of office that it was hard to recognize them. The ambassadors wore their best togs, the noble ladies (they are obliged to go in black) all their jewels. The plebs in their way were quite as decorative as the patricians,—peasants with goatskin trousers and cioce, monks and nuns of every order, flocks of students from the theological seminaries in the dress Dante wore. The German students in vermilion habits—the scarlet tanagers of the Roman landscape—are the finest. The Pope was due at ten; at a quarter before eleven the cardinals began to arrive. Their dress is admirable; it never looks so well as when they are marching down the aisle at St. Peter’s. At eleven the Pope appeared in the gestatorial chair carried by eight lackeys in crimson brocade: Michael Angelo, they say, designed this livery too. The tall white feather fans carried in the procession reminded me of a bas-relief on the walls of the ruins at Karnak in Egypt representing the Pharaoh going in triumph to the temple. Pharaoh’s chair was not unlike the sedia gestatoria, the feather fans seem identical, the triple crown of the Pope is very like the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt worn by Rameses. In the midst of all this swirl of color imagine Leo’s alabaster face with the eyes of brown fire. When he rose feebly to give the benediction his hands looked transparent. There was even more shouting “Viva il papa ré!” than usual. The Pope is as exquisitely soigné as a young belle; his valet, Pio Centra,—one of whose duties is to taste everything his master eats or drinks,—certainly knows his business. Centra is a great personage and is kowtowed to by the people about the Vatican.

The Pope safely on his throne, I did not care to wait for the service and watched my chance of getting out. I edged my way to the vicinity of one of the exits and waited. I soon saw a gigantic German student—he must have been six feet six inches tall—who was evidently of the same mind about going. I managed to slip in behind him and follow in his wake. When we were close to the door the press was so great that I really was frightened; in another moment I should have been separated from my giant. In desperation I seized the streamers of red broadcloth that hung from his shoulders. He looked behind him, saw a woman, fancied the de’il was after him, and fled for his life, cleaving the solid wall of people with his mighty elbows. The faster he ran the tighter I held on, till at last he brought us both through that awful pressure—I thought it would break my ribs—down the steps and out into the piazza, where I let him go. I am not sure which of us was the most frightened!

One of the Guardia Nobile (the Pope’s Noble Guard) told me that in the year 1889 he was on duty in the Pope’s antechamber the night after the dedication of the statue of Giordano Bruno—a renegade Dominican or a great reformer, according to your politics—on the very spot where in 1600 Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy. The Pope was much offended, he felt that the Church had been insulted; there was even talk of removing the seat of the papacy from Rome. That plan, if it ever was seriously considered, was soon given up. The whole matter had agitated the Pope tremendously, and the people about him felt anxious about his health. When the usual hour passed for his light to be put out they grew more and more nervous. Eleven, twelve, one o’clock, still that thin line of light under the door. Finally they knocked. No answer. They gently opened the door and saw the old man kneeling weeping at his priedieu. Our friend, a man of the world, had been deeply moved by that glimpse through the open door. As for me, “’t is as if I’d seen it all.”

Like Pius the Ninth, Leo began by trying for a liberal policy. The power behind the throne—the faction of intransigentes—was too strong for him. When he was elected Pope he wished to give his benediction to the vast throng of people in the Piazza from the window over the door of St. Peter’s, as his predecessors had done. This was opposed, but a rumor spread through the city that the new Pope stood firmly to his intention. The Piazza was crammed with waiting people; at the Quirinal the royal carriage stood ready to bring the Queen to the Piazza to receive the blessing. After a long delay those who watched with glasses saw a small white figure hurrying down the passage which leads to the window. The Pope was coming! Suddenly the white figure hesitated, paused, turned back, retreated. The way had been barricaded with benches!

Sovereign Pontiff, indeed! This was forcible coercion!

When you stop to think about it, nobody is quite free. The freest man I know is Scipione, the travelling knife-grinder. He carries his tools on his back, the open street is his shop, the people he meets his customers. As I sat at work this morning I heard the welcome sound of his cracked bell. My knife being duller than even I can endure, I hailed him from the window. He came slowly up the long stair to the landing outside the old green door, and bade me a civil good morning.

“We have not seen you for a long time, I was afraid I should have to buy a new knife,” I said.

Scipione let a few drops of water trickle from the tap of the small can fixed above his wheel, ran his finger along the edge of my penknife, held the blade to the emery wheel, and began to work the treadle with his foot.

“It is quite true, I have not passed this way lately. You did well, however, to wait for me. Another might have ruined this really desirable knife, whose beauty and value the first comer might not realize.” Under my admiring eyes, the sparks began to fly from the wheel—who does not work better when watched by admiring eyes?

“That is a good trade of yours, is it not, Scipione?” I said.

“E un arte civile, Signora. Non c’è ‘boss’; quando si vuole lavorare, si lavora, quando si vuole reposare, si riposa (It is a civil art; there is no ‘boss’; when one feels like working, one works, when one wishes to rest, one rests).”

“You have not told me what kept you so long away.”

“My grandmother has been ill, Poverella, there is nobody but myself to look after her.”

Scipione is not so free as I had supposed!

“Where does the nonna live?”

“At Carpineto, the paese of Il Gran Ciociaro over there,” he nodded towards the Vatican. “Nonna remembers his Holiness when he was a lad. She was among those pilgrims from his native town to whom he gave an audience the other day. What do you think he said to her? He asked her about the big chestnut tree under whose shade he used to walk when he was studying his lessons. Do you suppose that pleased her? There is no tree in the world that receives such attention as the old chestnut tree of Il Gran Ciociaro at Carpineto.”

V
IN THE ABRUZZI MOUNTAINS

Roccaraso, September 8, 1898.

We left Rome, the heat already somewhat abating, on the 2d of September. Though we had been so anxious to get away, it took an effort of will at the last. Action of any kind was abhorrent, the dolce far niente had us in thrall. We finally got off at nine o’clock one morning, and arrived here at seven the same evening, having changed cars at Solmona, the home of Ovid, where we had an hour and a half to see the sights. Solmona is a good-sized town with paved streets, interesting churches, several inns,—at any of which one might risk putting up,—and a market-place, Piazza Ovidio, where we bought a basket of pears and a flask of wine: one or the other made us very ill; it is much safer to bring along provisions for such a journey. The train next passed through a wide valley, one vast orchard, red with apples “ripe and ready to drop”; then the engine began to tug, tug, up into the mountains. The road is a strategical railway, built not to meet any demand of traffic or travel, but for the transportation of troops.

“Roccaraso is the highest railroad station in Europe,” said the proud person in uniform who took our tickets. Government owns and operates all railroads; the employés are gold-laced, red-tape government officials; this one controls telegraph, mail, express—all intercourse with the outer world. We therefore forbore to mention Brenner, the station in the Alps between the Austrian Tyrol and Italy, which I believed to be even higher.

The town of Roccaraso is above the station, a castello perched aloft on a spur of one of the upper Abruzzi. Below us is a wide, flat valley, all around us are crowding blue mountains, head rising above head, like inquisitive giants peeping over one another’s shoulders. The air is like rarefied electricity; the water has been tested and guaranteed absolutely pure—you know bad water is the danger of these remote, primitive villages. Our friend, the Marchesa di V., asked the engineer who laid out the railroad (it has been open only a few months) to find her a healthy place for the summer. He recommended this

Roccaraso

From a pencil drawing

unknown mountain fastness. Here she retired with her bambini early in June. Having made herself comfortable, she prepared to make us so: hired a pleasant apartment for us,—it belongs to the widow of the ex-mayor, lately defunct,—ordered the landlady to give it three coats of whitewash, engaged Elena, a stout wench, to scrub, do the heavy work, and fetch water from the village fountain, and bade us “come on.” We came, bringing our guardian angel Vittoria, the tall seamstress, to cook and take care of us. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, must have looked like our Vittoria—calm, gentle, with rare sweetness and remarkable beauty. We sent up from Rome oil, wine, vinegar, and groceries enough to last out our stay. The Marchesa has a loaf of bread come by mail every day from Rome for the babes; she is a woman of resource, she does the impossible, the only thing worth doing! Elena’s mother makes bread for us; it is coarse and rather hard, but it suits us well enough. This is the most primitive Italy we have yet seen. Neither butter, meat, nor Parmesan cheese (quite as important) can be had here. The wine is detestable, vino cotto (cooked wine), brought up in goatskins from the valley below on muleback. We are above the grape and olive belt; our meat comes twice a week from Castel di Sangro, four miles off; our butter, every other day, from Pesco Costanzi, two miles away, via the girls express established by the Marchesa.

Our apartment (it costs fifteen dollars a month) is over the village school; it has its own separate entrance, through a grim paved court-yard, where Vittoria keeps the turkey or chicken she is fattening for us. You ring a bell; whoever is within pulls a string which lifts the latch. You go up two flights of massive stone stairs to reach the living part, where we have a decent bedroom, a fair, formal salon, dining-room, and a kitchen—such a kitchen! The ex-mayor’s family must have lived in this room, except on high days and holidays, when they perhaps sat upon the deceitful parlor chairs and sofas—which had all been pasted together for our benefit and broke down at the first trial. The kitchen is an immense, smoke-browned room, with a big fireplace at one end, where all the cooking is done. Copper pots and kettles hang from the iron crane, a spit stands on the hearth, strings of red peppers swing from the rafters. There are no bellows; to coax the blaze, Elena, the vestal, kneels and blows through a long iron tube, her breath coming out through the mouth of the snake’s head at the end. It is cold to-night; the kitchen is the only warm place; I am writing close to Elena’s rousing brushwood fire. Outside there is a howling wind, inside a leg of mutton revolves slowly on the spit. Every moment I expect to see the King of the Golden River blow down the chimney and beg for a slice of that savory roast.

Roccaraso, September 16, 1898.

We are living in the pastoral age! Each family in Roccaraso supplies its own needs, asks little of its neighbors and of the outside world—nothing but salt, wine, and oil. Life is set to the tune of “The Poor Little Swallow.” We wake in the early morning to “povera rondinella, O povera rondinella!” sung by the women and girls trudging up from the valley with bundles of fagots on their heads for the winter woodpiles. They are busy preparing for the long, cold season, which falls early hereabouts. Acorns for the pigs, fodder for the cows, goats, and sheep, dried peas, beans, and corn for the humans must all be carefully stored away. For several days we have watched the women winnowing the chaff from the wheat. At sunrise yesterday half a dozen girls started, each with a heavy sack of grain on her head, to walk to the nearest grist-mill, seven miles away. At sunset they came back carrying the precious flour, which must be preserved with extreme care. Good or bad, it is their mainstay through the severe winter; if it should mildew, they would eat it all the same, with the fear of the dreadful pellagra in their hearts.

The government doctor, who goes periodically about the country to visit the sick and is an intelligent man,—standing rather too much on his dignity for comfortable intercourse, but a perfect mine of information,—says that pellagra, endemic in some parts of Italy, comes from the poor food the people eat, chiefly from the mildewed flour. It is a skin disease, which produces a painful red eruption, and all sorts of nervous and other horrors. From the autumn when the few green vegetables they raise are consumed till they are again ripe the following summer, the people live on polenta, made of cornmeal, macaroni, potatoes, dried peas, and sheep’s-milk cheese. In case of illness a little meat to make broth is procured, otherwise the diet is vegetarian, except on Christmas and Easter, when several families club together to make a feast, and one peasant kills a sheep or a goat, having agreed with his neighbors which part of the animal shall be allotted to each.

We have made friends with our opposite neighbor the belle of Roccaraso, a modern Penelope. We found her at her loom as usual, in a tiny stone cottage, the floor plain, trodden earth, the walls roughly plastered inside. She is even prettier seen close at hand than through the window; she wears the Roccaraso dress—you know each village has its own special costume. This is plainer than many of them, but good and appropriate. Over her head she wears a square of linen edged with lace, folded to cover the neck and lower part of the face (older women are particular to hide the mouth), a full skirt of dark homespun, a black apron, and a bright jacket, showing a colored kerchief and a full white shirt.

“Will the gentry do me the favor of entering?” she gently invited us.

“We would not interrupt your work.”

“Enter, enter!”

“If you will go on with your weaving.”

She sat down at her loom before a web of rough linsey-woolsey and shot the shuttle threaded with red linen across the woof of black wool. We ordered a dress pattern of the same stuff as that she was weaving, and some heavy white flannel striped with corn-flower blue, delicious in color and fabric.

“The signori are North Americans, yes? They come from Pittsbourgo?” Penelope began.

“North Americans, yes, not from Pittsburg.” She was disappointed, but a visiting-card partly consoled her.

“How do you call yourself?” J. asked.

“Mariuccia, per servirla.”

“This yarn you weave with, Mariuccia, tell us where it came from?” She seemed astonished at the question, took a distaff from a nail, and showed us how she used it.

“’Gnor, I made the yarn with this rocca; so, how else?”

“And the wool, where did you get that?”

“’Gnor, from my own sheep.”

“Can you spin flax also, and weave linen?”

“Altro! “She lifted the cover of an old marriage-chest—it smelt of lavender.

“Behold my corredo.” The chest held the linen she had woven for her marriage,—towels, sheets, table-cloths, and napkins, enough to last her lifetime.

“See what Andrea sent me “for Natale” (Christmas). She took out of the cassone a pair of high-heeled, pointed-toed boots—they would have crippled her in a week—and a pair of American storm rubbers.

“The accursed ones of the Dogana forced me to pay three francs duty upon these original shoes; in confidence between us two, I cannot wear them.”

“The cioce are better for you. Where did these come from?”

“My husband, he sent them to me.”

“From Pittsbourgo?”

“’Gnor, si, he is a cutter of stone at that place.”

“Why are you not with him?”

“’Gnor, the great fear of the sea. Besides, Andrea is a good husband, he sends me money every month from Pittsbourgo.”

There you have the secret of Mariuccia’s superiority: Andrea is a good husband and sends her money from Pittsburg, therefore she alone of all the women is exempt from work in the fields. She is personally neat and keeps her two rooms clean. Her cousin, a slatternly creature, living next door, and evidently the beauty’s guardian,—asked us into her house. In spite of our curiosity to see interiors we quailed at the threshold of that hovel inhabited by the village naturale (simpleton), who is brother to Mariuccia’s cousin, a large turkey gobbler, and several hens.

As we took leave, Mariuccia shyly pulled my sleeve. “When the signori return to America they will take a passeggiata one day to Pittsbourgo to see my Andrea, yes?” she whispered.

“Figlia mia, from our paese it would take twelve hours’ travelling, even by the railroad, to reach Pittsbourgo.” Mariuccia smiled incredulously, she did not believe us but was too polite to say so.

J. says that when Mariuccia goes to mass she carries the American shoes on her head (I think when he met her she must have been taking them to show to some friend) and wears cioce on her feet. To fit the cioce to the foot of the wearer, a square of cowhide, with the hair still on, is soaked in water till it becomes soft and

Marta, a Vestal of the Abruzzi

From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Mrs. Whitman

pliable; a hole is then made in each of the four corners of the hide; the foot is placed on the damp leather, leathern thongs are passed through the holes and wound round and round the leg and tied at the knee, so that the ciociari, as the wearers of the cioce are called, go cross-gartered like Malvolio. When the cowhide is dry it has taken the shape of the foot, and this simplest of all footgear is ready to wear.

The flat pad worn on the head to support the water-jar is Mariuccia’s pocket. It is the obvious place to carry things. When there is no heavier burden of wood or water, her knitting or door key takes its place. I sent Elena with a packet to the Marchesa to-day—of course, she put it on her head. As it contained nothing but chiffon, the wind sent it whirling, and Elena said “Sfortunata!” Her little sister, Tina, three years old, balances a block of wood on her head and toddles alongside when Elena goes to draw water at the fountain; she is learning the art of burthen-bearing. Marta, who is six,—the age at which the vestals were admitted to the novitiate,—has sole charge of the household fire. When her mother and grandmother toil up from the valley with their mighty loads of fagots, Marta trots gallantly beside them under her small load of brush for kindling.

“Why does not your brother, Francesco, help to carry up wood?” we asked Marta. She shook her firm little head:

“’Gnor, questo non èlavoro da uomo (That is not man’s work).” Francesco is eight; his hair is a golden fleece, his cheeks are red apples.

I notice that no man carries weights on his head; if by a rare chance he has a load to carry, he takes it on his back. We asked the doctor if the splendid port of the women came from the caryatid act. He said it was possible, but that the price was high. “So many of the poor creatures die of consumption. Only the strongest resist.” Here is the survival of the fittest with a vengeance!

We are good friends with the sindaco of Roccaraso, a social soul pleased with an opportunity of enlightening the stranger. His village has a population of seventeen hundred, mostly old men, women, and children. Four hundred of the young men are in “Pittsbourgo,” most of them, like Andrea, stone-masons. Others are stable-strappers at Rome or Naples. The only able-bodied men we have seen at work are the barber and the blacksmith. The women do practically all the work of the community; they dig, plough, sow, and reap. The free, proud bearing this gives them is wonderful; their beauty surpasses belief. Michael Angelo’s sibyls spin at every street corner, Raphael’s Madonnas suckle their children at every doorway. The old women are either strong and upright, like Elena’s grandmother, or, if they go to pieces and crouch into withered crones, it is with an admirable sombre dignity. We have only once been begged from: a very old woman,—she looked like Vedder’s Cumæan sibyl,—evidently ill and suffering, and distinctly not a professional beggar, after looking furtively about to see if any one were in sight, laid hold of the hem of my dress and asked for money. She touched her hand to her lips before and after receiving it, as they do in the orient. We fancy we come across other traces of Saracen influence (they overran this part in the Dark Ages) in three-year-old Tina’s tiny frock covering her down to the feet, and the way the women hide their mouths when a stranger passes. In a town to the southward the women wear veils, which they draw half over their faces when out of doors.

Roccaraso, September 25, 1898.

Still in this sublime place, keyed up and braced famously by the fine air. No, the name is not Roccarasa, though the mistake is perfectly natural. Roccaraso is an abbreviation of Rocca del Rasino, rock of the Rasino, the name of the stream running through the valley. The walled, fortified town was founded in the fifth century; it has changed very little since. Late this afternoon we stumbled up the badly paved street, passed out under the ancient gateway between the two ruined towers, down the steep, stony way to the sheepfolds at the foot of the hill. The girls were waiting to milk the flocks driven up from the valleys and down from the hills by the shepherds and their dogs. From the distance came the song of the “Little Swallow” played on a pipe by Francesco, who tends a composite flock of sheep and goats. In the early morning Francesco passes through the town calling his herd together. At the sound of his voice four brown sheep file down the steps from the house opposite, a black goat and five white sheep patter out from Mariuccia’s spare chamber—the very sheep whose wool is being spun and woven for my cream-colored flannel. This evening Francesco and his flock reached the folds before all the others. Mariuccia’s shaggy black goat made an odd grunting noise as it walked.

“Do all the goats here have such strange voices?” we asked Francesco.

“’Gnor, no, this animal was brought up with a litter of pigs; in this manner he learned their language.”

Elena’s grandfather, Giacomo, the chief of the shepherds, came in next, leading his blind cosset lamb and knitting as he walked: a tall, stern, gnarled old man, with white hair and keen eyes, over six feet tall, past seventy years old. His dress is handsome and substantial: dark blue homespun knee breeches, jacket and leggings, with silver buttons; a wide felt hat, and a long black cloak lined with green baize. He has two dogs, lean and fierce, with wiry white hair, pointed noses, and careworn faces. They have heavy collars studded with sharp iron spikes.

“Good-evening, Sor’ Giacomo, how goes it?”

“’Gnor, badly. Last night the wolves carried off the calf I was fattening for Christmas.”

“Where were the dogs?”

“They keep watch at the folds; the calf was at my cottage.” He counted the sheep as they filed through the wicket into the pen. “Vent’ uno, venti due; it is early for wolves, but—one understands it—yesterday I met the padre of Pesco Costanzi.”

“What has that to do with your calf or the wolves?”

Sor’ Giacomo shrugged his shoulders and went on counting his sheep. We understood: the priest of Pesco Costanzi has the “malocchio” (evil eye).

“How many are your sheep, Sor’ Giacomo?”

“Trenta (thirty), as you see.”

“It was not always so; formerly there were more?”

“’Gnor, si. When I was Francesco’s age my father had five thousand sheep in his care. In those days we of the Abruzzi raised wool for the whole kingdom, for the world, if you will. Now it is finished: these poor, miserable ones scarcely suffice to clothe Roccaraso.”

“Why is this thing so?”

“Why? because of an infamy. Understand, since that castello was built,—who knows how long ago?—since that time at the season when the white (snow) comes, when the earth sleeps, we of the Abruzzi have always had the right to drive our sheep down to the plains of Apulia, there to graze through the winter. In a moment the thing is changed, the old right is taken away, we are forbidden to drive down our sheep. But is the winter changed? are the wolves banished? does the grass grow all the year in these mountains? I tell you it is finished.”

Giacomo is right, it is finished; he is one of the last pastori Abruzzesi. It is a pity; fourteen centuries of herding sheep have produced a pur sang I have not often seen. The people hereabouts have that proud look of race that the Bishereen of Egypt and some of the American Indians have. “Moglie e buoi ai paese suoi (wives and cattle from your own country)” is a rule rarely broken. The old shepherd-kings of the Abruzzi married only hill women, scorning the effete race of the plain, the vitiated blood of the cities. Giacomo cannot understand a people particular about the breeding of horses and dogs careless about the breeding of men. He said to his granddaughter Elena:

“What! you wish to marry that poor, sickly fellow, Paolo? Do you think more of yourself than of your family? Lucky for you your parents were not so selfish and imprudent.”

Elena has given up Paolo. She wants to go to Rome with us, to earn a little money to add to her dote, so that she may have pretensions to make as good a marriage as Mariuccia! The mariage de convenances, you see, is as much the rule among the Italian peasants as among the aristocrats.

We walked to Pesco Costanzi yesterday through the green valley, where the hobbled donkeys were grazing, and over a golden pasture infested with talkative geese. All the able-bodied women were at work in the glorious fields, threshing oats, shelling corn, drying beans. In the village, humpbacked, crippled, invalid women sat at the doors of their dark cottages making lace. The Marchesa first discovered the survival of an ancient lace industry in this hamlet. In the days of the Medici, girls from Pesco Costanzi found their way to Florence, on some sort of scholarship, and brought back the art of lace-making, and the fine renaissance patterns of that time which the women make to this day. We like it better than any peasant lace we have seen, and have ordered several patterns of it, the doctor undertaking to remit the money and deliver the goods.

On the way back to Roccaraso we passed by the tiny hamlet of Pietro Anzieri, where we saw a man ploughing a desolate patch of land with the forked branch of a tree shod with a long iron point, a primitive kind of plough I remember to have seen represented in an Etruscan wall painting. We loitered by the way, watching the lone man at work, whereat he stopped, leaned on his plough, and hailed us with the best Bowery accent.

“Say, are youse from the Yernited States?”

“Oh, yes, we are North Americans.”

“Of course; I see that. I come from New York myself. How you like Pietro Anzieri? Too slow for me; I only come to see my old mother; go back next month; got a job at Pittsbourgo.”

He was a hearty fellow, twenty-two or-three years old, a good type of the Abruzzi peasant, plus the American expression.

“How long have you lived over there?”

“Since I was a leetle boy—eleven or twelve, I dunno.”

The doctor says that most of those who go out to America under the age of twenty take root in our country and stay there. Men of thirty only remain long enough to “make their pile,” coming back to Italy to grow old and spend it.

Roccaraso, September 28, 1898.

To Castel di Sangro this morning: a gay market-town set in a flowery meadow beside a small river widening below the bridge into a pond where the women were washing clothes. I thought I recognized a pink shirt being beaten between two stones as one of J.’s, which Elena ought to have herself washed. Her aunt lives here. Perhaps she is a washerwoman! We were puzzled by the name, Castel di Sangro,—the castelli are all hill towns,—till we learned that the inhabitants several hundred years ago deserted the original Castel di Sangro, perched on a hill even harder to climb than Roccaraso’s, and moved, bag and baggage, down to the plain and founded the present town. The fibre of the race had softened since the founders built that crumbling castello! We climbed to the top; the view was well worth the stiff walk. The old town is now a city of the dead. Long lines of black numbered crosses mark the graves. Where they stopped a wide, deep open trench began. An old fellow, a sort of rustic sacristan, who had come up to clean the church, was the only person in sight.

“What is that trench for?” we asked him.

“’Gnor, who can tell which of us it may serve as a bed? In summer we prepare for winter; when the earth is frozen hard we cannot break her crust to bury the dead.” He went back to the church and began to toll the bell.

Looking down, we saw a funeral procession like that in Siegfried climbing slowly up the narrow, steep mountain path. We went down by a steep track on the other side to avoid meeting it.

We lunched at the inn; J. ordered trout (the stream is alive with them), which were served pickled! Everything else was very good. It was a market day, and the town was full of people; one dealer wished to sell us a horse, another offered a cow with a crumpled horn. Everywhere the women were busy making conserva di pomodoro; outside the windows of nearly every house were wooden bowls full of mashed tomatoes evaporating in the sun. This conserve is the staple condiment of Italian cooking, as necessary as butter or Parmesan cheese. The tomatoes are reduced to a stiff red paste, which keeps indefinitely and is used to make tomato sauce, to dress risotto, spaghetti, carciofi, served in every conceivable way. Being so concentrated it makes a much richer sauce than you can get from canned tomatoes. When we got back to Roccaraso we found that Vittoria had begun to prepare our winter supply of conserva—it takes days to make it. This gives the house a pervasive fragrance of “golden apples” and produces a comfortable sense of household thrift.