CHAPTER V.

So I lived. What they said of me at the bridge-corner was fair enough; only that silly soul, Serafina, thought too much of a trumpery pair of little red boots, only big enough for a grasshopper, and costing one nothing but a palm's-breadth of kid. But women are so: they have no medium; either they drink the sea dry and are thankless, and if they got the stars down out of heaven would stamp them in the dust, or else they are like the poor taverner's wife, and give all their loyal souls' big gratitude for the broken crust of a careless gift.

So I lived, I say, and had done nearly twenty years, in Rome. In the summers sometimes I went up among the little villages on the sides of the Sabine and Volscian Mountains, under the cork- and chestnut-woods, where the women foot it merrily in front of the wine-shop, and the pipe and mandolin chirp all through the rosy evening. But I never wandered so far away that I could not see the gold cross on St. Peter's; and many a summer day, when all in Rome was lifeless as a graveyard, | | 47 and only a few chanting friars bore a dead man through the streets, I and Palès stayed in the city for love's sake, and talked only to the gods that haunt the fountains.

I was content with my life,--which is more than most great men can say. I had a love of droning and dreaming, and was well satisfied if I had enough to get me a plate of beans and a flask of thin red wine; and I had all my days through been cursed or blessed with that sort of brain which makes a man understand a great many things but never enables him to achieve any one thing.

It is not an unhappy way of being constituted,--at least, when one basks under the Roman sun and asks no other good of the gods. All the twenty odd years since I had cone back into Rome I had been happy enough in a whimsical--and I dare say foolish--fashion, here in my nook by the Ponte Sisto, close on to Tiber, where the soft hyacinthine hills curve fold on fold beyond the yellow water, and under the ilex shadows on the other bank the women hang out the linen of Rome to blow and to bleach in the breeze from the sea.

I got with time to be a feature of the place, and to belong to it as much as the stone lions did; and the people, with that power of eternal tongue-wagging with which heaven has endowed my country-people beyond any other folk of the earth, made as many traditions for me as though I were a headless saint instead of a brainless sinner; and there I stayed beside my stall, without any change, except on dogs that died in the course of nature.

My friend the ferryman, going to and fro the Ripetta wharf, in his little green boat shaped like Noah's ark, passed not more regularly than the course of my own days went and came,--till I dreamed my dream in the drowsy noon.

I was always dreaming, indeed: over old coins thrown up by the plow; over some beautiful marble limb, uncovered as they dug for a wine-cellar; before some dim shrine under an archway, where a fading frescoed Christ-child smiled on a ruined, moss-grown torso of Hercules; on any and every thing of the million of wonders and of memories that are about us here thick as golden tulips in the grass in April. But this noonday dream was different: it kept with me all the hot slumberous afternoon, when even Palès was too sound asleep to get up and kill a fly or smell a cat. And my conscience was ill at | | 48 ease: I seemed to myself to have behaved ill, yet how I did not very well know.

It seemed to me that I ought, against her will, to have gone with her to see that Syrian Jew. Her face haunted me,--that pale, sad face, of unspeakable sorrow, as she had looked down the Pescheria. So must have looked Beatrice, gazing from the grated casement in the palace there.

How much one cares for Beatrice! If I owned Barberini, her portrait should hang no longer in that shabby chamber, where the very sunbeams look like cobwebs, companioned by vile Fornarina, and that yet viler wife of Sarto's: it should hang all by itself in a little chapel, draped with black, with a lamp always burning before it, in emblem of the soul, that all the brutes encompassing her had no power to destroy.

Only fifteen! Yet strong as women are not. Beatrice had the strength of passion,--the strength to dare and to endure. There is no passion in your modern lives, or barely any. You have lewdness and hypocrisy. They are your twin darlings, most worshiped on the highest heights. But passion you have not: so you fear it.

I was thinking of Beatrice, and of this other girl, gone after Beatrice down into the shadow of the old walls of Balbus, and was listening to the music of a lute and a fiddle chiming together somewhere on the bridge, and watching two mites of children dancing outside a doorway, with tangled curls flying, and little naked rosy feet twinkling on the stones.

Sitting at a stall may be dull work,--Palès thinks so sometimes,--but when it is a stall in the open air, and close against a fountain and a bridge, it has its pleasures.

I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill nature and selfishness out of one.

Anything in the open air is always well: it is because men nowadays shut themselves so much in rooms, and pen themselves in stifling styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory-room Félix Pyat.

If I worked in an attic, and saw naught but the shoe that I sew, no doubt I should fall thinking where that shoe had been, what stealth it had stolen to, what intrigue it had stepped | | 49 softly to smother, how many times it had crossed a church doorway, how many times it had stumbled over a wine-shop threshold,--all manner of speculation and spite, in a word, of my neighbor who wore it, because I should see nothing but the shoe, and it would fill my atmosphere, and dwell on my retina, a black spot obscuring all creation. But here the shoe is only a shoe to me, because I see the wide blue skies, and the splashing water, and the broad sunshine, and the changing crowds, and the little children's flying hair, and the silver wings of the wheeling pigeons. I work at the shoe, but it is only a shoe to me.

When one thinks of the Greeks playing, praying, laboring, lecturing, dreaming, sculpturing, training, living, everlastingly in the free wind and under the pure heavens, and then thinks that the chief issue of civilization is to pack human beings in rooms like salt fish in a barrel, with never a sight of leaf or cloud, never a whisper of breeze or bird,--oh! the blessed blind men who talk of Progress!

Progress! that gives four cubic feet of air apiece to its children, and calls the measurement Public Health!

But I am only Crispin of the Ponte Sisto, stitching for my bread: these are fool's fancies: let them pass.

We of Italy keep something of the old classic love of air, we live no time in-doors that we can live out; and though Progress is pushing our chairs off the pavements, and doing its best to huddle us sheep-like into our pens, we resist toto corde, and we still sit, and smoke, and saunter, and eat and drink, and pursue our trade and our talk, with no roof but the bright, broad, kindly sky.

As I sat at my stall in the warm smiling afternoon, getting drowsy, tapping at worn soles, and stupidly wondering how those little things could find the fire in them to dance so in the heat, I could not in any way get my Ariadne out of my head, were it ever so, as I tinkered split leather in the sunshine.

It was as if one had seen a yellow-winged oriole, that has been fed on flower-dew and pomegranate-buds, shut down into the low wooden traps that the boys go bird-hunting with in the thickets along Tiber.

The day lengthened; the shadows deepened; the air cooled; the ventiquattro rang from many clocks and bells; people began to wander out into the street.

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Handsome Dea came smiling for her yellow shoes; big Basso swore at me good-temperedly because his butcher-boots were not ready; Padre Sylvio grumbled because his sandals lay untouched; Marietta, the vintner's wife, told me of a fine marriage that Pippo had made up for her eldest daughter with a tailor of Velletri; Maryx, my sculptor, came and talked to me of a portfolio full of designs of Bramante, that he had discovered and got for a song in an old shop in Trastevere; even Hilarion, going by with his swift horses, leaped out in his easy, gracious fashion, and bade me come up to his villa and drink his old French wines there, whilst he should idle among his roses, and scrawl half a sonnet, and lie half asleep with his head in a woman's lap, under the awning on his marble terrace.

But I even let Hilarion go on his way, with that black-browed singer whom he favored for the moment; and I did not care for Bramante's beautiful porticoes and domes and bridges; and I heard nothing that Marietta was telling me of the fine trade receipts of that young tailor of Velletri,--because I kept thinking of that sea-born Joy with the face of the Borghese bronze, who had gone down into the darkness of the Ghetto.

"Giojà, Giojà! they should have called her Ariadne," I muttered, tossing the old bits of leather together on the board, and thinking of her likeness to that bronze, and of my dream. And Marietta, and all the rest of them coming out into the cooling air as the Ave Maria rang, grew very cross with me because I did not listen to them; and Padre Sylvio came again and grumbled for full ten minutes about his unmended sandals.

He gone, there came a fisher fellow that I knew, with empty baskets on his head, and loitered by my stall a minute, a red carnation in his mouth,--as big black-browed and lusty a Roman as you could want to see, who led a pleasant life enough, knee-deep for the most part of it, in the tawny Tiber water, dredging for small fish, with half the spoils of Judea, and half the glories of Nero's house, for anything he knew, under the sands that he waded on, unthinking.

He tossed me a bright little pair of shining mullets on the board as a gift.

"What were you doing in Fiumara this morning?" he asked me. "I saw you there, as I sold any fish. It was a girl you showed the way to?--yes, I spied her skirt flutter, and asked: | | 51 she went to old Ben Sulim, eh? I could have told you what he would do, the meanest, sulkiest Jew dog in the Ghetto. It was not pretty of you, Crispin,--not pretty to leave her there. I would have brought her home myself, only my Candida has a jealous eye, and would welcome her with the big chopping-adze for certain."

"What happened? What did the man do?" I asked him, my conscience pricking sharply, for I had had no Candida with a chopping-adze to fear.

"Cursed her, and drove her down the stairs. What else could she look for?--unless she went to buy, or took him a bargain. The rascal is so poor! I do not know her errand rightly. But so I heard. Pray, what was she?"

"She said that she was the daughter of his daughter. And he has driven her away?"

"So they said in Fiumara. I did not see, myself. But if she be of the old Syrian blood, she will do well enough: the hags there will show her fifty roads to fortune. All those singing-wenches whose throats get choked with gold and diamonds are of that accursed race; great eyes, and a thrush's voice, and a shark's maw,--that is your Jewess all the world over. Make your mind easy, Crispin. She will do."

And he went on his way with his empty baskets, singing lustily, to pour some crawfish into his fair Candida's pot at home.

Great eyes, and a thrush's voice, and a shark's maw. Well, say it were a Jewess the world over; say it were Woman--very often--everywhere; yet that did not make my conscience quieter for the fate of that sea-born Joy swallowed up in the Ghetto.

Of course it was no business of mine; of course it mattered nothing to me: still, it harassed me, and made me ill at ease,--so ill at ease that I stripped off my apron once again, and put Palès again on guard, and left the stall, just as the pleasant, chattering, gossiping populace's hour of sunset drew near at hand, and went my way much faster than at noonday, down towards the black shadows of the Conic pile.

"I am an ass," I said to myself: there was a nice little fry cooking on Pippo's stove for my eating; there was a barrel of fine Veii wine that had been given me because I had found a Venus in the vineyards that had brought a million of scudi to | | 52 the owner of the soil; there was a game at dominoes with my neighbors, which we played so regularly after dark whenever I was not roaming; there was a strange little black-letter copy of .in annotated Satyricon that I had picked up the day before and had barely had time to rejoice in; there were all these things and a dozen more to pass the time agreeably, for we always were merry in the quarter of the tanners, where the lutes twanged all night long; and yet I turned my back on them all, and went after what could be no concern of mine, down into the Ghetto.

I envy the people who are occupied only with their own fortunes and never turn aside to follow the fates of others. Selfishness is the spinal marrow of comfort. As for me, I never could help troubling myself about the troubles of other folk. I suppose when one is always mending the holes that others have trodden their leather into along the highway stones and dust, one gets a habit of sympathy with the pilgrims that break down,--perhaps.

"I am an ass," I said to myself; and yet I went on and on towards the palace-prison of poor dead Beatrice.

I made my way quickly into the Pescheria, and found the same two hags picking at the same old rags. They looked up and grinned.

"Are you come for that pretty maiden of yours?" they said to me. "Well, we will have none of her; she came down the stairs as she went up them; she was barely a second above-head. We would have kept her, for she is one of those morsels that your great churchmen love; but she would not listen; she looked stupid. She went away yonder."

They pointed to the northwest. Perhaps, I thought, she had been coming to me. My first impulse was to go and see the Syrian miser in his den; my next, to leave him for awhile until I found her, for it was sunset, and night was near at hand.

I searched about the surrounding streets, asking hither and thither; but it was not easy to describe her, for in the streets she had drawn her hood over her head, and there were other girls in linen dresses. But I lighted on one or two who had noticed such a figure pass, and by these mere threads of guidance I traced her to the Forum Romanum, and the Capitol, and the little dusky church that covers the depths of dread old Tullianum.

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You think of Peter and of Paul whenever you pass there; I think of Jugurtha and Vercingetorix; they perished without hope. It had been better for Cæsar to have saved that noblest foe, than to have gone on his knees up yonder stairs of Jupiter Feretrius.

But for once I thought not of Cæsar, not even of Vercingetorix, this summer evening as the shadows deepened, and the bells for vespers tolled; for on those steps of Ara Cœli I saw her, sitting wearily, her whole frame drooped together with the listlessness of bodily fatigue and moral abandonment.

There were the brick arches that artists love, and the mosaic of the Madonna above her head; there was a dim rose flush in the gloom from the set sun; within the church, choristers were chanting their lessons; the solemn strains and the distant voices sounded sad and mystical.

She was not crying, as most girls would have been, but her head was drooped, and her arms fell wearily over her knees, in an attitude which had a despairing desolation in it, mute and very deep. She must have been very tired, too; and as I drew near to her I saw--for a cobbler looks first at the feet--that one of hers had bled a little, where a stone had pierced through the leather of her poor worn shoe.

Somehow,--because it moved me professionally, I suppose,--that little stain of blood upon the stones touched me more than the most violent sorrow and weeping would have done.

She was alone on the steps.

The place was deserted. With the glad summer night at hand, Romans had other sport than to roam under the well-known pile of the Capitol: there were blind-cat, and many another game, to play in the wide squares, gossip to hear by the cool-sounding fountain-edge, figs and fish to be eaten in great piles at all street-corners, jaunts out to be made in rattling pony-carts along the blossoming Campagna to the wine-house,--a thousand, and ten thousand things to do, rather than to come to vespers in this sad old church, or go yonder to St. Joseph of the Carpenters.

I went up to her, and touched her gently: she raised her head with a bewildered look.

"Is it true?" I asked her. "Is it true that your mother's father has driven you out so cruelly?"

"He does not believe," she said, simply.

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"Believe! But you have papers?"

"He would not look at them."

"But he could be made, forced, obliged," I said, hotly; not so sure of the law as of my own temper and of my fierce fury against this wretched Syrian in the Ghetto.

"I would not wish it," she said, with a sort of shudder of disgust. "I would rather think that he is right,--that I am nothing to him,--that there is some mistake. These are the steps where Gracchus was struck down?"

"Yes; and after him Rienzi," I answered her, not wondering much at her thinking of such things at such a moment, because I always think of them myself in season and out of it. "But what did he do? what did he say? Was he indeed brutal to you? Tell me more."

"It does not matter," she said, wearily. "Yes, he was unkind. But then he did not believe, you know: so it was natural."

"But why did you not come to me?"

"I went to the Capitol, to see the Faun."

"The Faun! He could not help you."

"Yes. It is help--it gives courage--to see those things that one has dreamt of. How he smiles! he does not care that Praxiteles is dead!"

There was a dreamy faintness in her voice, like the voice of one light-headed from fever or from want of food.

She was so calm and so dry-eyed, she frightened me. She was all alone on earth, and sixteen years old, and without a roof to cover her in all the width of Rome, and yet could talk of Gracchus and of Praxiteles!

"What will you do, my dear?" I said to her, trying to draw her back to the perils of her present place. "Shall I go see this Syrian and try to soften him? If he be your mother's father, he must have some sort of feeling, and some right--"

She shuddered, and looked at me with sad, strained eyes. "No. He called my mother evil names. I would not go to him, not if he begged me. And it was so vile there, so vile; and I was so happy--thinking I came to Rome!"

Then at last she broke down into a passion of tears, her head bowed upon her knees. I think her grief was still much more for Rome than for herself. Men hate the tears of women: so do I; yet I felt more at ease to see them then.

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I touched, and tried to raise her.

The singing of the choristers echoed from the church within; the warm glow died; the night fell quite; there were only a stray dog and the solitary figure of a monk,--here where the conquerors had used to come, with clash of arms, and loud rejoicings, whilst their captives passed downward into the eternal darkness of the Pelasgic prisons.

"Come with me, my dear," I said to her, for she was so helpless now, and so young that she seemed nothing more than a child, and I lost my awe for her as of the awakened Ariadne. "Come with me," I said. "You are sorely tired, and must be wanting food too. I will do you no harm; and I have a little, clean place, though poor; and we can speak about your trouble better there than in the street here. I am Crispin the cobbler,--nothing else. But you may trust me. Come."

It was some time before she stilled herself and fully understood me, for she was stupefied with fatigue and pain. and followed me, when her passionate low weeping ceased, with the exhausted docility of a poor animal that has been over-driven.

She was only sixteen years old; and she had thought to come to the Rome of Octavia!

I led her almost in silence to my home.

As you come from Janiculum, across the bridge of Pope Sixtus, you may see on your right hand, high up in the last house wall, a window, with pots of carnations on a wooden balcony, and bean-flowers running up their strings across it, and it hangs brightly right above the water, and any one sitting at it can look right away up and down the grand curves of Tiber upon either side, with the tumble-down houses and the ancient temples jumbled together upon the yellow edges of the shores.

It was the window of my room. Of course I was most at home in the open air, but I had to sleep somewhere, and the old marbles and the old books that I had got together could not lie out in the rain of nights; so this was my home, and Pippo, who lived on the same landing, cooked for me; and Ersilia, who lived below, looked after it for me; and old blind Pipistrello, who lived above, and fiddled so sweetly that all the goldfinches and nightingales high above in the woods that were Galba's gardens strained their throats for envy, used to come and fiddle there sometimes, with his blind eyes turned to the | | 56 yellow water, and the temple of Vesta, and the Sacred Island, and the ruins of the Temple of Healing.

To this one room of mine I took my Borghese Ariadne, who had gained human limbs and dragged them very wearily along. What else could I do? One could not leave a girl like that to go to her death, or to worse than death, in the streets of a city quite strange to her, where she had not a friend, and only sought gods that were dead.

I talked on to her as we went, rambling nonsense no doubt, and I do not think she heard a word of it: at least, she never answered; she moved dully and silently, her head drooping, her feet seeming heavy as lead. As I turned to her on the threshold of the house upon the bridge, she grew paler and paler, stumbled a little, put out her hands with a feeble gesture, and would have fallen but for me. She had grown giddy, and lost consciousness from exhaustion and long fasting and being in the sun all through the hours of the day.

Old Ersilia was spinning in the doorway; she cried out and came to help,--a good soul always, though of direful hot temper; between us we bore her within into Ersilia's bed, and then I left her for a little to the woman's care, and stood troubled in the street without.

I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

With the help of the pipe I made up my mind, and went up-stairs into my chamber.

It would have looked a poor, bad place enough to rich people, no doubt; but yet it looked fine to the people of my quarter,--much too fine for a vagabond cobbler, even when he sat quiet and respectable at his stall and might be almost called a shoemaker. For in twenty years' living, with odd tastes, and many persons kind to me, and ideas of a dwelling-place different from my country folks,--from having traveled far and lived with men sometimes very far above me in position of life,--I had collected things in it that took off for me its desolateness and homeliness and made it unlike any other room in that Rione.

There were some old German pipes, with mediæval potters' painting on their bowls, relics of my old days in Dürer's city; there were little bits of delicate French china, little cups and | | 57 figures and milk-bowls, that women had given me in those good times of my youth and my wanderings; there were three massive old quattrocento chairs, with seats of gilded leather; there were a few old mezzotinto prints, and some of Stefano della Bella's animals, that artists had given me; there was a grand old tarsia cassone, too, that Hilarion had sent there one day to be kept for him, and never had taken away again; and there were many pieces of agate and cameo, of bronze and of marble, that I had found myself in the teeming soil of the Agro Romano, as the wooden plow of some peasant turned them upward, or the browsing mouth of some ox cropped the herbage that had hidden them. And, above all, I had my armless Mercury, really and truly Greek, and almost as well preserved as the Mercury of the Vatican; a very thoughtful, doubting Hermes, mine, as though he had just made woman, and in his young, cold heart was sorry for her, as though foreseeing that the fair and dark brothers, Eros and Anteros, would one or other always conquer and bind her, so that the wiles and ways, the facile tongue and the unerring sight, with which he himself dowered her, would be powerless to keep her from slavery and from kissing the steel of her chains, and from most worshiping the one who locked them fastest and made their fetters surest with a blow.

That was, I used to think, what my Greek Hermes thought of where he stood, a fair, maimed thing, in the Pentelic marble. Some said that Cephisodatus made him: for myself, I loved to go yet higher, and believed that Cephisodatus's mighty father did so. Anyhow, it was too good for my little, shabby, dusky, stone chamber, where it had to be companioned with oil-flasks and wine-flasks, and melons and cabbages, and leather and old shirts, and the straw of Palès's bedding. But when the sun came in red over the red bean-flowers on the balcony, and touched his delicate and noble head, I loved him very dearly, and he gave a tender grace, of an earlier and gladder age than ours, to the old bare room upon the river, and seemed to shed a light about it that did not come from the broad blue sky of Rome.

I had a few other little things:--carved arms, whose beauty made one see the whole woman that was lost; an old Etrurian bracelet, bronze, and green as the mould that grows over the tombs of peasants and of kings; a lamp with a mouse upon | | 58 it, that might have shed light upon the brow of Sant' Agnese herself, kneeling in the bowels of the earth, where never daylight or moonlight came; a colossal head of Greek sculpture, shattered from the throat on some day of siege when the marble temples fell like axe-hewn saplings, blackened and bruised, and cracked by fire, but with the crown of flowers and of fruit still fresh as though Glycera had just plucked them to be mimicked in the Parian by her lover's chisel. These things I had, and they lent a grace to my attic; and now and then they offered me gold for them, and I ate my bit of black bread and refused. It was pleasant to feel that I, only Crispin the cobbler, had something the world would like to have and could not, unless I chose.

Possession is the murderer of human love; but of artistic love it is the very crown and chaplet, unfading and life renewing.

Still, though I would not sell my Hermes, I was a very poor man; for in all trades--from statecraft to shoemaking--it is he who makes holes, not he who mends them, that prospers.

"See how well I fare," said old Lippo Fede, who is a cobbler, too, in another Rione, and who one day got warmed with wine and spoke incautiously. "Look you, Crispin, whenever I sew up a hole I slit another, just a snick with a knife,--blacked over, and never seen when the shoes go home. Eh. praise the saints! the selfsame pair is back upon my stall within a fortnight, and I make my moan over the rottenness of leather. But you, my dear, you mend the hole, you see, and never pierce a new one. Well you may be poor! Besides, it is not fair to the craft; not fair in any way. What right have you to mend shoes so that people, seeing how yours wear, may get to think the rest of us a set of cheats and rascals? There is no good fellowship in that, nor common sense, nor brotherhood."

Thus Fede.

You greater ones, who are not shoemakers or shoemenders, but lawgivers, book-writers, politicians, philosophers, logicians, reformers, and all the rest, do you not find Humanity your Lippo Fede? "Do not spoil trade," your brethren cry, when you would fain be honest.

But I do not drill holes, despite good Fede's grumbling and reproaches; and so I am poor.

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Yet I thought to myself, --

"A girl cannot cost much to keep, not much more than a couple of thrushes, I suppose; at least, to be sure, the thrushes wear no garments: still, just for a week or two, till she can look round her, one would not be ruined. Into the streets she cannot go, and the convents would not do for her. Instead of entering Ara Cœli, she went to see the Faun."

So I thought to myself, and set to work clearing away Palès's straw nest, and the old flasks, and the general litter, and smelling all the while with hungry nostrils the fry that Pippo was frying for me, and which I never should taste,--at least, if she could manage to eat it.

When I had made my room. neat, which was easy to me, because I can turn my hand to most kinds of work, and see no shame in any of it when I have done it,--feeling glad, I remember, to see those scarlet beans at the casement all so bravely flowering up their strings, because they might please her with the sunset-gilded water shining through their leaves, --I went down again to Ersilia.

"Is she better?" I asked, and heard that she was so. "Then, like a good soul, take the linen off my bed up there," I said to her, "and put fresh linen on, and let her have that room of mine for to-night, at any rate; and let her fancy it an empty room we have here doing nothing."

"You know nothing of her?" said the old soul, suspicious of me.

"On my word, nothing; but I am not afraid. And you, Ersilia, my dear, you would not have wished your daughter, had she lived, to want a roof between her and the shame or the starvation of the streets?"

"No," said Ersilia, with her bright, fierce eyes dimming. She had had an only child, and lost her at sixteen years old of cholera. "No; and you have a true tongue, Crispin, and are an honest man. But if I do what you want, where will you sleep?"

"Oh, anywhere. Palès and I can always find a bed together. Go up and get the linen now, and take her there; and do not frighten her, and I will bring her something she can eat."

"But she is of foul Jew spawn."

"No more than you or I, or Palès. The Jew disowns her. Anyhow, she is a girl; and the streets are vile."

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"She is handsome," said Ersilia, still suspicious.

"So much the worse for her. Go up and get the bed ready, dear Ersilia," said I.

And then I went out and gossiped a little with the people, so as to turn their hearts towards her; because, did they think her of Jewish blood, I knew they would hoot at her, to say the least, and very likely drive her out with stones, or accuse her of poisoning the bright waters of our fountain.

But I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture. Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and so had Jack Cade.

They were all ready to hear, or rather to scream questions, which is a crowd's favorite way of hearing, especially when that crowd is three parts female. The mere sight of the tired, drooping figure following me across my threshold had been enough to set them all aflame with curiosity: so small a thing is enough for us to chatter of, ten hours long, in Rome.

I set their sympathies for and not against her, and told a lie flatly, and said there was nothing of Jewish blood in her, and had no time to do more, but ran in and got the fry from Pippo's kitchen. Brown and golden it was, lovely as a fry could be, hot as hot, and seething and smoking in the sweetest manner, all its little bubbles singing loud; but I covered it up, and put a nice little roll of white bread and a little fruit beside it, and put it all into Ersilia's hand, with a glass of Lachryma Christi from the little dark hole in the stairs where I keep my wine.

I did not like to go up to her myself.

"Is she in my room?" I asked.

Ersilia nodded. She was cross; she went up into the darkness of the stairway.

I smoked my pipe in Pippo's kitchen, to escape the questions of the people; for that corner by the Repetta fountain, and the bridge itself, were growing full and resonant with voices as the evening coolness came.

Pippo, who was always deaf, and was then busy getting ready a supper to go across in a tin dish to a plump priest, had heard nothing, and so asked nothing. I was not willing that he should hear. Pippo was the best of souls, but a devout believer, to whom Jews and heretics were lower than the gar- | | 61 bage-seeking swine. Pippo fried his cutlets by the saints' grace, and kept nigh two hundred days out of each year holy, by snoring through them and drinking a little more than ordinary.

In half an hour's time Ersilia came down the stairs again: the plate was emptied.

"That looks well," said I, cheerfully. "She has got back her appetite, at least."

"Nay, not a bit did she touch. She ate the fruit; I ate the fritter. It were a shame to waste good food the good saints give!" said Ersilia, and expected me to be pleased. I!--who was hungry as a peasant's donkey, and could not for shame's sake ask Pippo for another supper. Besides, his charcoal was gone out, all its live ashes being shoveled into the tin box to keep his reverence's platter warm.

"She ate nothing!" I said, ruefully. And, indeed, it was hard upon me.

"The saints will remember it to you, just as well as though she had eaten it," said Ersilia, with a gleam of humor in her eyes. "It was more fit for me. She picked a little of the fruit, bird-like, being thirsty. I think she has got fever."

"You will not leave her alone?" I begged, and felt that the sharp, honest soul was worth a hundred fries and fritters.

Ersilia nodded.

"Oh, for the matter of that, they want nothing in fever; they lie like stocks and stones. But I will see to her. Where do you sleep to-night yourself?"

"I shall do well anywhere,--with Palès!" I answered, and walked out, knowing they would only laugh at me for being so anxious about a stray strange girl,--I, an old man and past all follies of the heart and fancy.

Palès was sitting, bolt upright, and with a shrewd and anxious face, beside the stall, for it was past her hour to be released: at sunset she and I were always drinking and eating cosily in some nook if it were bad weather, or off rambling beyond the gates along the broad green level if it were fair. Palès detested change of any kind: there is no more conservative politician than a dog.

But to-night I only gave her leave to go away and hunt her cats or meet her lovers, as she chose, within the length of the street and bridge, and sat down myself to my board.

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"I must finish Padre Trillo's shoes," I said to my neighbors, and stitched away at them, and kept my pipe in my mouth to escape gossiping, with the little oil lamp swinging to and fro on its cord under my awning, and the people coming and going, with its light upon their faces.

"He is in one of his queer moods," they said to one another, passing me. It is of use to have a reputation for queerness: it gains one many solitary moments of peace.

Meanwhile the night drew on, and the bean-flowers before my window up on high lost their color in the moonlight.

I wondered what my Hermes thought of the new form that he gazed upon,--he who made woman.

Have you never known what it is to believe in the thoughts of a statue? You have never lived with marble, then,--marble that speaks to you like a living thing, only that is so much greater than any living thing ever was!

I worked half the night at Padre Trillo's shoes. He was a heavy man, who trod heavily; and there was much to be done to them. The people cleared away one by one, little by little, till all the gay, mirthful, dancing, love-making, wine-drinking little groups were broken up and gone, and one began to hear in the stillness the singing of the nightingales up on high, where the woods and gardens were, and the boughs still rustled that saw Tasso die.

When I had driven in the last brass nail, there was no sound at all but of their distant singing, and of the falling of the fountain near at hand. It was an hour past midnight, the hour, you know, when the buried and forgotten gods arise, they say, and pass through Rome, weeping, bound together by fetters of dead leaves.

I laid myself down upon my plank, with Palès curled beneath it, and fell asleep: I dreamed of other lives than this, and in my dreams the nightingales sorrowing for Itys, and the Faun in the fountain-water piping of dead days, mingled themselves together, and told me many things.

But who cares what they said, or would believe? These are only brown birds and perished fables: so you say! And I am only Crispino the cobbler, stitching at old leather for old Rome.