I don't get my imagination entirely from momma.

"Viva il Prefetto! Viva L'opposizione!" poppa repeated pityingly, as another pair of posters came in sight. "Well, it won't ever do the Government of Italy any good, but I guess I'm with the Opposizione."

The road grew emptier and sandy white, and commerce forsook it but for here and there a little shop with fat yellow bags, which were the people's cheeses, hanging in bladders at the door. Crumbled gateways began to appear, and we saw through them that the villa gardens inside ran down and dropped their rose leaves into the blue of the Mediterranean. We met the country people going their ways to town; they looked at us with friendly patronage, knowing all about us, what we had come to see, and the foolishness of it, and especially the ridiculous cost of carozza that take people to Pompeii. And at last, just as the sun and the jolting and the powdery white dust combined had instigated us all to suggest to the Senator how much better it would have been to come by rail, the ponies made a glad and jingling sweep under the acacias of the Hotel Diomede, which is at the portals of Pompeii.

It seemed a casual and a cheerful place, full of open doors and proprietary Neapolitans who might have been brothers and sisters-in-law, whose conversation we interrupted coming in. There had been domestic potations; a very fat lady, with a horn comb in her hair, wiped liquid rings off the table with her apron, removing the glasses, while a collarless male person with an agreeable smile and a soft felt hat placed wooden chairs for us in a row. Poppa knows no Italian, but they seemed to understand from what he said that we wanted things to drink, and brought us with surprising accuracy precisely what each of us preferred, lemonade for momma and me, and beverages consisting largely, though not entirely, of soda water for the Senator and Mr. Dod. While we refreshed ourselves, another, elderly, grizzled, and one-eyed, came and took up a position just outside the door opposite and sang a song of adventurous love, boxing his own ears in the chorus with the liveliest effect. A further agreeable person waited upon us and informed us that he was the interpreter, he would everything explain to us, that this was a beggar man who wanted us to give him some small money, but there was no compulsion if we did not wish to do so. I think he gave us that interpretation for nothing. The fat lady then produced a large fan which she waved over us assiduously, and the collarless man in the soft hat stood by to render aid in any further emergency, smiling upon us as if we were delicacies out of season. Poppa bore it as long as he could, and we all made an unsuccessful effort to appear as if we were quite accustomed to as much attention and more in the hotels of America; but in a very few minutes we knew all the disadvantages of being of too much importance. Presently the one-eyed man gave way to a pair of players on the flute and mandolin.

"Look here," said poppa at this, to the interpreter, "you folks are putting yourselves out on our account a great deal more than is necessary. We are just ordinary travelling public, and you don't need to entertain us with side shows that we haven't ordered any more than if we belonged to your own town. See?" But the interpreter did not see. He beckoned instead to an engaging daughter of the fat lady, who approached modestly with a large book of photographs, which she opened before the Senator, kneeling beside his chair.

"Great Scott!" exclaimed poppa, "I'm not a crowned head. Rise, Miss Diomede."

Removing his cigar, he assisted the young lady to her feet and led her to a sofa at the other end of the room, where, as they turned over the photographs together, I heard him ask her if she objected to tobacco.

"You may go," said momma to the interpreter, "and explain the scenes. Mr. Wick will enjoy them much more if he understands them." The freedom from conventional restraint which characterises American society very seldom extends to married gentlemen.

We had to wait twenty minutes for the other party, on account of their British objection to anybody's dust. Even Mr. Mafferton looked quelled when they arrived, and Isabel quite abject, while Mrs. Portheris wore that air of justification which no circumstance could impair, which was particularly her own. She would not sit down. "It gives these people a claim on you," she said. "I did not come here to run up an hotel bill, but to see Pompeii. Pompeii I demand to see." The players on the flute and mandolin looked at Mrs. Portheris consideringly and then strolled away, and the guide, with a sorrowful glance at the landlady, put on his hat. "I can explain you everything," he said with an inflection that placed the responsibility for remaining in ignorance upon our own heads, but Mrs. Portheris waved him away with her fan. "No," she said. "I beg that this man shall not be allowed to inflict himself upon our party. I particularly desire to form my own impression of the historic city, that city that did so much for the reputation of Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton. Besides, these people mount up ridiculously, and with servants at home on half wages, and Consols in the state they are, one is really compelled to economise."



It was difficult to protest against Mrs. Portheris's regulations, and impossible to contravene them, so I have nothing to report of that guide but his card, which bore the name "Antonio Plicco," and his memory, which is a blank.

There was an ascent, and Mrs. Portheris mounted it proudly. I pointed out to poppa half-way up that his esteemed relative hadn't turned a hair, but he was inclined to be incredulous; said you couldn't tell what was going on in the Department of the Interior. The Senator often uses a political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine, dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination, peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds it with a rush of light—the place where they have gathered together what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled, and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we, who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was like a dead-house.

"Except," said poppa, "that in this mortuary there isn't ever going to be anybody who can identify the remains. When you come to think of it—that's kind of hard."

"No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum," said Dick with solicitude.

"I should like," remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her pince nez to get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces. "I should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it. These people were heathen, and richly deserved their fate. Richly!"

Momma looked at her husband's Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn. "Do you really think so?" she asked, but we could all see that her words were a very inadequate expression for her emotions. Mrs. Portheris drew all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle. "I am surprised——" she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.

"Ladies," he said, "'De mortuis nisi bonum,' which is to say it isn't customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their presence. I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays have got a cooler earth to live on," and that for the moment was the end of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.

"It's too terrible," she said. "We can actually see their features."

"Don't let them get on your nerves, Augusta," suggested poppa.

"I won't if I can help it. But when you see their clothes and their hair and realise——"

"It happened over eighteen hundred years ago, my dear, and most of them got away."

"That didn't make it any better for those who are now before us," and momma used her handkerchief threateningly, though it was only in connection with her nose.

"Well now, Augusta, I hate to destroy an illusion like that, because they're not to be bought with money, but since you're determined to work yourself up over these unfortunates, I've got to expose them to you. They're not the genuine remains you take them for. They're mere worthless imitations."

"Alexander," said momma suspiciously, "you never hesitate to tamper with the truth if you think it will make me any more comfortable. I don't believe you."

"All right," returned the Senator; "when we get home you ask Bramley. It was Bramley that put me on to it. Whenever one of those Pompeii fellows dropped, the ashes kind of caked over him, and in the course of time there was a hole where he had been. See? And what you're looking at is just a collection of those holes filled up with composition and then dug out. Mere holes!"

"The illusion is dreadfully perfect," sighed momma. "Fancy dying like a baked potato in hot ashes! Somehow, Alexander, I don't seem able to get over it," and momma gazed with distressed fascination at the grim form of the negro porter.

"We've got no proper grounds for coming to that conclusion either," replied poppa firmly. "Just as likely they were suffocated by the gas that came up out of the ground."

"Oh, if I could think that!" momma exclaimed with relief. "But if I find you've been deceiving me, Alexander, I'll never forgive you. It's too solemn!"

"You ask Bramley," I heard the Senator reply. "And now come and tell me if this loaf of bread somebody baked eighteen hundred and twenty something years ago isn't exactly the same shape as the Naples bakers are selling right now."

"Daughter," said momma as she went, "I hope you are taking copious notes. This is the wonder of wonders that we behold to-day." I said I was, and I wandered over to where Mrs. Portheris examined with Mr. Mafferton an egg that was laid on the last day of Pompeii. Mrs. Portheris was asking Mr. Mafferton, in her most impressive manner, if it was not too wonderful to have positive proof that fowls laid eggs then just as they do now; and I made a note of that too. Dicky and Isabel bemoaned the fate of the immortal dog who still bites his flank in the pain extinguished so long ago. I hardly liked to disturb them, but I heard Dicky say as I passed that he didn't mind much about the humans, they had their chance, but this poor little old tyke was tied up, and that on the part of Providence was playing it low down.

Then we all stepped out into the empty streets of Pompeii and Mr. Mafferton read to us impressively, from Murray, the younger Pliny's letter to Tacitus describing its great disaster. The Senator listened thoughtfully, for Pliny goes into all kinds of interesting details. "I haven't much acquaintance with the classics," said he, as Mr. Mafferton finished, "but it strikes me that the modern New York newspaper was the medium to do that man justice. It's the most remarkable case I've noticed of a good reporter born before his time."

"A terrible retribution," said Mrs. Portheris, looking severely at the Tavern of Phoebus, forever empty of wine-bibbers. "They worshipped Jupiter, I understand, and other deities even less respectable. Can we wonder that a volcano was sent to destroy them! One thing we may be quite sure of—if the city had only turned from its wickedness and embraced Christianity, this never would have happened."

Momma compressed her lips and then relaxed them again to say, "I think that idea perfectly ridiculous." I scented battle and hung upon the issue, but the Senator for the third time interposed.

"Why no, Augusta," he said, "I guess that's a working hypothesis of Aunt Caroline's. Here's Vesuvius smokin' away ever since just the same, and there's Naples with a bishop and the relics of Saint Januarius. You can read in your guide-book that whenever Vesuvius has looked as if he meant business for the past few hundred years, the people of Naples have simply called on the bishop to take out the relics of Saint Januarius and walk 'em round the town; and that's always been enough for Vesuvius. Now the Pompeii folks didn't know a saint or a bishop by sight, and Jupiter, as Aunt Caroline says, was never properly qualified to interfere. That's how it was, I presume. I don't suppose the people of Naples take much stock in the laws of nature; they don't have to, with Januarius in a drawer. And real estate keeps booming right along."

"You have an extraordinary way of putting things," remarked Mrs. Portheris to her nephew. "Very extraordinary. But I am glad to hear that you agree with me," and she looked as if she did not understand momma's acquiescent smile.

We went our several ways to see the baths, and the Comic Theatre, the bakehouse and the gymnasium; and I had a little walk by myself in the Street of Abundance, where the little empty houses waited patiently on either side for those to return who had gone out, and the sun lay full on their floors of dusty mosaic, and their gardens where nothing grew. It seemed to me, as it seems to everybody, that Pompeii was not dead, but asleep, and her tints were so clear and gay that her dreams might be those of a ballet-girl. A solitary yellow dog chased a lizard in the sun, and the pebbles he knocked about made an absurdly disturbing noise. Beyond the vague tinted roofless walls that stretched over the pleasant little peninsula, the blue sea rippled tenderly, remembering much delight, and the place seemed to smile in its sleep. It was easy to understand why Cicero chose to have his villa in the midst of such light-heartedness, and why the gods, perhaps, decided that they had lent too much laughter to Pompeii. I made free of the hospitality of Cornelius Rufus and sat for a while in his exedra, where he himself, in marble on a little pillar in the middle of the room, made me as welcome as if I had been a client or a neighbour. We considered each other across the centuries, making mutual allowances, and spent the most sociable half-hour. I take a personal interest in the city's disaster now—it overwhelmed one of my friends.



CHAPTER XVII.

On the Lungarno in Florence, in the cool of the evening, we walked together, the Senator, momma, Dicky, and I. Dicky radiated depression, if such a thing is atmospherically possible; we all moved in it. Mr. Dod had been banished from the Portheris party, and he groaned over the reflection that it was his own fault. At Pompeii I had exerted myself in his interest to such an extent that Mr. Mafferton detached himself from Mrs. Portheris and attached himself to momma for the drive home. Little did I realise that one could be too agreeable in a good cause. Dicky insinuated himself with difficulty into Mr. Mafferton's vacant place opposite Mrs. Portheris, and even before the carriages started I saw that he was going to have a bad time. His own version of the experience was painful in the extreme, and he represented the climax as having occurred just as they arrived at the hotel. The unfortunate youth must have been goaded to his fate, for his general attitude toward matters of orthodoxy was most discreet.

"There is something Biblical," said Mrs. Portheris (so Dicky related), "that those Pompeiian remains remind me of, and I cannot think what it is."

"Lot's wife, mamma?" said Isabel.

"Quite right, my child—what a memory you have! That wretched woman who stopped to look back at the city where careless friends and relatives were enjoying themselves, indifferent to their coming fate, in direct disobedience to the command. Of course, she turned to salt, and these people to ashes, but she must have looked very much like them when the process was completed."

That was Dicky's opportunity for restraint and submission, but he seemed to have been physically unable to take it. He rushed, instead, blindly to perdition. "I don't believe that yarn," he said.

There was a moment's awful silence, during which Dicky said he counted his heart-beats and felt as if he had announced himself an atheist or a Jew, and then his sentence fell.

"In that case, Mr. Dod, I must infer that you are opposed to the doctrine of the complete inspiration of Holy Writ. If you do not believe in that, I shudder to think of what you may not believe in. I will say no more now, but after dinner I will be obliged to speak to you for a few minutes, privately. Thank you, I can get out without assistance."

And after dinner, privately, Dicky learned that Mrs. Portheris had for some time been seriously considering the effect of his, to her, painfully flippant views, upon the opening mind of her daughter—the child had only been out six months—and that his distressing announcement of this morning left her in no further doubt as to her path of duty. She would always endeavour to have as kindly a recollection of him as possible, he had really been very obliging, but for the present she must ask him to make some other travelling arrangements. Cook, she believed, would always change one's tickets less ten per cent., but she would leave that to Dicky. And she hoped, she sincerely hoped, that time would improve his views. When that was accomplished she trusted he would write and tell her, but not before.

"And while I'm getting good and ready to pass an examination in Noah, Jonah, and Methuselah," remarked Dicky bitterly, as we discussed the situation on the Lungarno for the seventh time that day, "Mafferton sails in."

"Why didn't you tell her plainly that you wanted to marry Isabel, and would brook no opposition?" I demanded, for my stock of sympathy was getting low.

"Now that's a valuable suggestion, isn't it?" returned Mr. Dod with sarcasm. "Good old psychological moment that was, wasn't it? Talk about girls having tact! Besides, I've never told Isabel herself yet, and I'm not the American to give in to the effete and decaying custom of asking a girl's poppa, or momma if it's a case of widow, first. Not Richard Dod."

"What on earth," I exclaimed, "have you been doing all this time?"

"Now go slow, Mamie, and don't look at me like that. I've been trying to make her acquainted with me—explaining the kind of fellow I am—getting solid with her. See?"

"Showing her the beauties of your character!" I exclaimed derisively.

"I said something about the defects, too," said Dicky modestly, "though not so much. And I was getting on beautifully, though it isn't so easy with an English girl. They don't seem to think it's proper to analyse your character. They're so maidenly."

"And so unenterprising," I said, but I said it to myself.

"Isabel was actually beginning to lead up to the subject," Dicky went on. "She asked me the other day if it was true that all American men were flirts. In another week I should have felt that she would know what was proposing to her."

"And you were going to wait another week?"

"Well, a man wants every advantage," said Dicky blandly.

"Did you explain to Isabel that you were only joining our party in the hope of meeting her accidentally soon again?"

"What else," asked he in pained surprise, "should I have joined it for? No, I didn't; I hadn't the chance, for one thing. You took the first train back to Rome next morning, you know. She wasn't up."

"True," I responded. "Momma said not another hour of her husband's Aunt Caroline would she ever willingly endure. She said she would spend her entire life, if necessary, in avoiding the woman." But Dicky had not followed the drift of my thought.

I added vaguely, "I hope she will understand it"—I really couldn't be more definite—and bade Mr. Dod good-night. He held my hand absent-mindedly for a moment, and mentioned the effectiveness of the Ponte Vecchio from that point of view.

"I didn't feel bound to change my tickets less ten per cent.," he said hopefully, "and we're sure to come across them early and often. In the meantime you might try and soften me a little—about Lot's wife."

Next day, in the Ufizzi, it was no surprise to meet the Miss Binghams. We had a guilty consciousness of fellow-citizenship as we recognised them, and did our best to look as if two weeks were quite long enough to be forgotten in, but they seemed charitable and forgiving on this account, said they had looked out for us everywhere, and had we seen the cuttings in the Vatican?

"The statues, you know," explained Miss Cora kindly, seeing that we did not comprehend. "Marvellous—simply marvellous! We enjoyed nothing so much as the marble department. It takes it out of you though—we were awfully done afterwards."

I wondered what Phidias would have said to the "cuttings," and whether the Miss Binghams imagined it a Briticism. It also occurred to me that one should never mix one's colloquialisms; but that, of course, did not prevent their coming round with us. I believe they did it partly to diffuse their guide among a larger party. He was hanging, as they came up, upon Miss Cora's reluctant earring, so to speak, and she was mechanically saying, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" to his representations. "I suppose," said she inadvertently, "there is no way of preventing their giving one information," and after that when she hospitably pressed the guide upon us we felt at liberty to be unappreciative.

I regret to write it of two maiden ladies of good New York family, and a knowledge of the world; but the Miss Binghams capitulated to Dicky Dod with a promptness and unanimity which would have been very bad for him if nobody had been there to counteract its effects. He walked between them through the vestibules, absorbing a flow of tribute from each side with a complacency which his recent trying experiences made all the more profound. There was always a something, Miss Nancy declared, about an American who had made his home in England—you could always tell. "In your case, Mr. Dod, there is an association of Bond Street. I can't describe it, but it is there. I hope you don't mind my saying so."

"Oh, no," said Dicky, "I guess it's my tailor. He lives in Bond Street;" but this was artless and not ironical. Miss Cora went further. "I should have taken Mr. Dod for an Englishman," she said, at which the miscalculated Mr. Dod looked alarmed.

"Is that so?" he responded. "Then I'll book my passage back at once. I've been over there too long. You see I've been kind of obliged to stay for reasons connected with the firm, but you ladies can take my word for it that when you get through this sort of ridiculous veneer I've picked up you'll find a regular all-wool-and-a-yard-wide city-of-Chicago American, and I'm bound to ask you not to forget it. This English way of talking is a thing that grows on a fellow unconsciously, don't you know. It wears off when you get home."

At which Miss Cora and Miss Nancy looked at each other smilingly and repeated "Don't you know" in derisive echo, and we all felt that our young friend had been too modest about his acquirements.

"But we mustn't neglect our old masters," cried Miss Nancy as those of the first corridor began to slip past us on the walls, with no desire to interrupt. "What do you think of this Greek Byzantine style, Mr. Wick? Somehow it doesn't seem to appeal to me, though whether it's the flatness—or what——"

"It is flat, certainly," agreed the Senator, "but that's a very popular style of angel for Christmas cards—the more expensive kinds. Here, I suppose, we get the original."

"That is Tuscan school, sir—madam," put in the guide, "and not angel—Saint Cecilia. Fourteen century, but we do not know that artiss his name. In the book you will see Cimabue, but it is not Cimabue—unknown artiss."

"Dear me!" cried momma. "St. Cecilia, of course. Don't you remember her expression—in the Catacombs?"

"She's sweet, always and everywhere," said Miss Cora, as we moved on, leaving the guide explaining St. Cecilia with his hands behind his back. "And you did go to Capri after all? Now I wonder, Nancy, if they had our experience about the oysters?"

"A horrid little man!" cried momma.

"Who showed you the way to the steamer——"

"And hung around doing things the whole enduring time," continued my parent, as Mark Antony's daughter turned her head aside, and Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, frowned upon our passing.

"He must have been our man!" cried both the Misses Bingham, with excitement.

"In the manner of Taddeo Gaddi," interrupted the guide, surprising us on the flank with a Holy Family.

"All right," said the Senator. "Well, this fellow proposed to bring our party oysters on the steamer, and we took him, of course, for the steward's tout——"

"Exactly what we thought."

"Since you are going to tell the story, Alexander, I may remind you that he said they were the best in the world," remarked momma, with several degrees of frost.

"My dear, the anecdote is yours. But you remember I told him they wouldn't be in it with Blue Points."

"Now what," exclaimed Miss Nancy, with excitement, "did he ask you for them?"

"Three francs a head, Nancy, wasn't it, Mrs. Wick? And you gave the order, and the man disappeared. And you thought he'd gone to get them; at least, we did. Nancy here had perfect confidence in him. She said he had such dog-like eyes, and we were both perfectly certain they would be served when the steamer stopped at the Blue Grotto——" Miss Cora paused to smile.

"But they weren't," suggested momma feebly.

"No, indeed, and hadn't the slightest intention of being." Miss Nancy took up the tale. "Not until we were taking off our gloves in the hotel verandah, and making up our minds to a good hot lunch, did those oysters appear—exactly half a dozen, and bread and butter extra! And we couldn't say we hadn't ordered them. And the lunch was only two francs fifty, complet. But we felt we ought to content ourselves with the oysters, though, of course, you wouldn't with gentlemen in your party. Now, what course did you pursue, Mrs. Wick?"

"Really," said momma distantly, "I don't remember. I believe we had enough to eat. Surely that is little Moses being taken from the bulrushes! How it adds to one's interest to recognise the subject."

"By B. Luti," responded Miss Nancy. "I hope he isn't very well known, for I never heard of him before. Now, there's a Domenichino; I can tell it from here. I do love Domenichino, don't you?"

I suppose the Senator knew that momma didn't love Domenichino, and would possibly be at a loss to say why; at all events, he remarked that, talking of Capri, he hoped the Miss Binghams had not felt as badly about inconveniencing the donkeys that took them to the top of the cliff as momma had. "Mrs. Wick," he informed them, "rode an ass by the name of Michael Angelo, perfectly accustomed to the climate, and, do you believe it, she held her parasol over that animal's head the whole way." At which everybody laughed, and momma, invested with an original and amiable weakness, was appeased.

"Of Michelangelo we have not here much," said the guide patiently. "Drawings yes, and one holy Family—magnificent! But all in another room w'ich——"

"Now what Bramley said about the Ufizzi was this," continued the Senator. "'You'll see on those walls,' he said, 'the best picture show in the world, both for pedigree and quality of goods displayed. I'd go as far as to say they're all worth looking at, even those that have been presented to the institution. But don't you look at them,' Bramley said, 'as a whole. You keep all your absorbing-power for one apartment,' he said—'the Tribune. You'll want it.' Bramley gave me to understand that it wasn't any use he didn't profess to be able to describe his sublimer emotions, but when he sat down in the Tribune he had a sort of instinctive idea that he'd got the cream of it—he didn't want to go any further."

We decided, therefore, in spite of such minor attractions as those of Niobe and her daughters, at once to achieve the Tribune, feeling, as poppa said, that it would be most unfortunate to have our admiration all used up before we reached it. The guide led the way, and it was beguiled with the fascinating experience of the Miss Binghams, who had met Queen Marguerite driving in the Villa Borghese at Rome and had received a bow from her Majesty of which nothing would ever be able to deprive them. "Of course we drew up to let her pass," said Miss Nancy, "and were careful not to make ourselves in any way conspicuous, merely standing up in the carriage as an ordinary mark of respect. And she looked charming, all in pink and white, with a faded old maid of honour that set her off beautifully, didn't she, Cora? And such a pretty smile she gave us—they say she likes the better class of Americans."

"Oh, we've nothing to regret about Rome," rejoined Cora. "Even Peter's toe. I wouldn't have kissed it at the time if the guide hadn't said it was really Jupiter's. I was sure our dear vicar wouldn't mind my kissing Jupiter's toe. But now I'm glad I did it in any case. People always ask you that."

When we arrived at the little octagonal treasure chamber Mr. Dod and Miss Cora sat down together on one of the less conspicuous sofas, and I saw that Dicky was already warmed to confidence. Momma at once gave up her soul to the young St. John, having had an engraving of it ever since she was a little girl, and the Senator went solemnly from canvas to canvas on tip-toe with a mind equally open to Job and the Fornarina. He assured Miss Nancy and me that Bramley was perfectly right in thinking everything of the Tribune, and with reference to the Dancing Fawn, that it was worth a visit to see Michael Angelo's notion of executing repairs to statuary alone. He gave the place the benefit of his most serious attention, pulling his beard a good deal before Titian's Venus (which poppa always did in connection with this goddess, however, entirely apart from the merit of the painting) and obviously making allowances for her of Medici on account of her great age. At the end of the hour we spent there it had the same effect upon him as upon Colonel Bramley, he did not wish to go any further; and we parted from the Miss Binghams, who did. As I said good-bye to Miss Cora she gave my hand a subtly sympathetic pressure, whispered tenderly, "He's very nice," and roguishly escaped before I could ask who was, or what difference it made. Having thought it over, I took the first opportunity of inquiring of Dicky how much of his private affairs he had unburdened to Miss Cora. "Oh," said he, "hardly anything. She knows a former young lady friend of mine in Syracuse—we still exchange Christmas cards—and that led me on to say I thought of getting married this winter. Of course I didn't mention Isabel."



CHAPTER XVIII.

Out of indulgence to Dicky we lingered in Florence three or four days longer than was at all convenient, considering, as the Senator said, the amount of ground we had to cover before we could conscientiously recross the Channel. But neither poppa nor momma were people to desert a fellow-countryman in distress in foreign parts, especially in view of this one's pathetic reliance upon our sympathy and support, as a family. We all did our best toward the distraction of what momma called his poor mind, though I cannot say that we were very successful. His poor mind seemed wholly taken up with one anticipative idea, and whatever failed to minister to that he hadn't, as poppa sadly said, any use for. The cloisters of San Marco had no healing for his spirit, and when we directed his attention to the solitary painting on the wall with which Fra Angelico made a shrine of each of its monastic cubicles he merely remarked that it was more than you got in most hotels, and turned joylessly away. Even the charred stick that helped to martyr Savonarola left him cold. He said, indifferently, that it was only the natural result of mixing up politics and religion, and that certain Chicago ministers who supported Bryan from the pulpit might well take warning. But his words were apathetic; he did not really care whether those Chicago ministers went to the stake or not. We stood him before the bronze gates of Ghiberti, and walked him up and down between rows of works in pietra dura, but without any permanent effect, and when he contemplated the consecrated residences of Cimabue and Cellini, we could see that his interest was perfunctory, and that out of the corner of his eye he really considered passing fiacres. I read to him aloud from "Romola," and momma bought him an English and Italian washing book that he might keep a record of his camicie and his fazzoletti—it would be so interesting afterwards, she thought—while the Senator exerted himself in the way of cheerful conversation, but it was very discouraging. Even when we dined at the fashionable open air restaurant in the Cascine, with no less a person than Ouida, in a fluff of grey hair and black lace, at the next table, and the most distinguished gambler of the Italian aristocracy presenting a narrow back to us from the other side, he permitted poppa to compare the quality of the beef fillets unfavourably with those of New York in silence, and drank his Chianti with a lack-lustre eye.

Towards the end of the week, however, Dicky grew remorseful. "It's all very well," he said to me privately, "for Mrs. Wick to say that she could spend a lifetime in Florence, if the houses only had a few modern conveniences. I daresay she could—and as for your poppa, he's as patient as if this were a Washington hotel and he had a caucus every night, but it's as plain as Dante's nose that the Senator's dead sick of this city."

"Dicky," I said, "that is a reflection of your own state of mind. Poppa is willing to take as much more Botticelli and Filippo Lippi as it may be necessary to give him."

"Oh, I know he would" Dicky admitted, "but he isn't as young as he was, and I should hate to feel I was imposing on him. Besides, I'm beginning to conclude that they've skipped Florence."

So it came to pass that we departed for Venice next day, tarrying one night at Bologna. We had cut a day off Bologna for Dicky's sake, but the Senator could not be persuaded to sacrifice it altogether on account of its well known manufacture, into the conditions of which he wished to inquire. The shops, as we drove to the hotel, seemed to expose nothing else for sale, but poppa said that, in spite of the local consumption, it had certainly fallen off, and, as an official representative of one of its great rivals in the west, he naturally felt a compunctious interest in the state of the industry. The hotel had a little courtyard, with an orange tree in the middle and palms in pots, and we came down the wide marble stairs, past the statues on the landing, and the paintings on the walls, to find dinner laid on round tables out there, I remember. A note of momma's occurs here to the effect that there is a great deal too much fine art in Italian hotels, with a reference to the fact that the one at Naples had the whole of Pompeii painted on the dining room walls. She considers this practice embarrassing to the public mind, which has no way of knowing whether to admire these things or not, though personally we boldly decided to scorn them all. This, however, has nothing to do with poppa and the commercial traveller. We knew he was a commercial traveller by the way he put his toothpick in his pocket, though poppa said afterwards that he was not exceptionally endowed for that line of business. He was dining at our table, and by his gratified manner when we sat down, it was plain that he could speak English and would be very pleased to do so. Poppa, knowing that his time was short, began at once.

"You belong to Bologna, sir?" he inquired with his first spoonful of soup. For some reason it seems impossible to address a stranger at a table d'hote, before the soup takes the baldness off the situation.

The gentleman smiled. He had a broad, open, amiable, red face, with a short black beard and a round head covered with thick hair in curls, beautifully parted. "I do not think I belong," he said; "my house of business, it is at Milan, and I am born at Finalmarina. But I come much to Bologna, yes."

"Where did you say you were born?" asked the Senator.

"Finalmarina. You did not go to there, no? I am sorry."

"It does seem a pity," replied poppa, "but we've been obliged to pass a considerable number of your commercial centres, sir. This city, I presume, has large manufacturing interests?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose. You 'ave seen that San Petronio, you cannot help. Very enorm'! More big than San Peter in Rome. But not complete since fourteenth century. In America you 'ave nothing unfinish, is it not?"

"Far as that goes," said poppa, "we generally manage to complete our contracts within the year; as a rule, I may say within the building season. But I have seen one or two Roman Catholic churches left with the scaffolding hanging round the ceiling for a good deal longer, the altar all fixed up too, and public worship going on just as usual. It seems to be a way they have. Well, sir, I knew Bologna, by reputation, better than any other Italian city, for years. Your local manufacture did the business. As a boy at school, there was nothing I was more fond of for my dinner. Thirty years ago, sir, the interest was created that brings me here to-day."

The commercial traveller bowed with much gratification. In the meantime he had presented a card to momma, which informed her that Ricardo Bellini represented the firm of Isapetti and Co., Milan, Artificial Flowers and Lace.

"Thirty years, that is a long time to remember Bologna, I cannot say that thirty years I remember New York. You will not believe!" He was obviously not more than twenty-five, so this was vastly humorous. "Twenty years, yes, twenty years I will say! And have you seen San Stefano? Seven churches in one! Also the most old. And having forty Jerusalem martyrs."

"Forty would go a long way in relics," the Senator observed with discouragement, "but my remarks had reference to the Bologna sausage, sir."

"Sausage—ah! mortadella—yes they make here I believe." Mr. Bellini held up his knife and fork to enable his plate to be changed and looked darkly at the succeeding course. "But every Italian cannot like that dish. I eat him never. You will not find in this hotel no." His manner indicated a personal hostility to the Bologna sausage, but the Senator did not seem to notice it.

"You don't say so! Local consumption going off too, eh? Now how do you explain that?"

Mr. Bellini shrugged his shoulders. "It is much eat by the poor people. They will always have that mortadella!"

"That looks," said the Senator thoughtfully, "like the production of an inferior article. But not necessarily, not necessarily, of course."

"Bologna it is very ecclesiastic." Mr. Bellini addressed my other parent, recovering a smile. "We have produced here six popes. It is the fame of Bologna."

"You seem to think a great deal of producing popes in Italy," momma replied coldly. "I should consider it a terrible responsibility."

"Now do you suppose," said poppa confidentially, "that the idea of trichinosis had anything to do with slackening the demand?"

Mr. Bellini threw his head back, and passionately replaced a section of biscuit and cheese in the middle of his plate.

"I know nossing, any more than you! Why you speak me always that Bologna sausage! Pazienza! What is it that sausage to make the agreeable conversation!"

"Sir," exclaimed the Senator with astonishment and equal heat, "you don't seem to be aware of it, but at one time the Bologna sausage ruled the world!"

Mr. Bellini, however, could evidently not trust himself to discuss the matter further. He rose precipitately with an outraged, impersonal bow, and left the table, abandoning his biscuit and cheese, his half finished bottle of Rudesheimer and the figs that were to follow, with the indifference of a lofty nature.

"I'm sorry I spoiled his dinner," said poppa with concern, "but if a Bologna man can't talk about Bologna sausages, what can he talk about?"

It made the Senator reticent, though, as to sausages of any kind, with the other commercial traveller—the hotel was full of them, and we found it very entertaining after the barren dining rooms of southern Italy—with whom we breakfasted. He spoke to this one exclusively about the architectural and historic features of the city, in a manner which forbade any approach to gastronomic themes, and while the second commercial traveller regarded him with great respect, it must be confessed that the conversation languished. Dicky might have helped us out, but Dicky was following his usual custom of having rooms in one hotel and covering as many others as possible with his meals, in the hope of an accidental meeting. This was excellent as a distraction for his mind, but since it occasionally led him into three dejeuners and two dinners, rather bad, we feared, for other parts of him. He had confided his design to me; he intended, on meeting Isabel's eye, to turn very pale, abruptly terminate his repast, ask for his hat and stick, and walk out with conspicuous agitation. As to the course he meant to pursue afterwards he was vague; the great thing was to make an impression upon Isabel. We differed about the nature of the impression. Dicky took it for granted that she would be profoundly affected, but he made no allowance for the way in which maternal vigilance like that of Mrs. Portheris can discourage the imagination.

Poppa made two further attempts to inform himself upon the leading manufacturing interest of Bologna. He inquired of the padrone, who was pleased to hear that Bologna had a leading manufacturing interest, and when my parent asked where he could see the process, pointed out several shops in the Piazza Maggiore. One of these the Senator visited, note-book in hand, and was shown with great alacrity every variety of mortadella, from delicacies the size of a finger to mottled conceptions as thick as a small barrel. He found a difficulty in explaining, however, even with an Italian phrase book, that it was the manufacture only about which he was curious, and that, admirable as the result might be, he did not wish to buy any of it. When the latter fact finally made itself plain, the proprietor became truculent and gave us, although he spoke no English, so vivid an idea of the inconsistency of our presence in his premises, that we retired in all the irritation of the well-meaning and misunderstood. The Senator, however, who had absolute confidence in his phrase book, saw a deeper significance in the remarkable unwillingness of the people of Bologna to expatiate upon the feature which had given them fame. "The fact is," said he gloomily, restoring his note-book to his inside pocket as we entered the terra-cotta doorway of St. Catarina, "they're not anxious to let a stranger into the know of it." And this conviction remaining with him, still inspires the Senator with a contemptuous pity for the porcine methods of a people who refuse to submit them to the light of day and the observation of the world at large.



CHAPTER XIX.

So far, momma said she had every reason to be pleased with the effect on her mind. About the Senator's she would not commit herself, beyond saying that we had a great deal to be thankful for in that his health hadn't suffered, in spite of the indigestibility of that eternal French twist and honey that you were obliged on the Continent to begin the day with. She hoped, I think, that the Senator had absorbed other things beside the French twist equally unconsciously, with beneficial results that would appear later. He said himself that it was well worth anybody's while to make the trip, if only in order to be better satisfied with America for the rest of his life, but why people belonging to the United States and the nineteenth century should want to spend whole summers in the Middle Ages he failed to understand. Both my parents, however, looked forward to Venice with enthusiasm. Momma expected it to be the realization of all her dreams, and poppa decided that it must, at all events, be unique. It couldn't have any Arno or any Campagna in the nature of things—that would be a change—and it was not possible to the human mind, however sophisticated, with a livelong experience of street cars and herdics, to stroll up and take a seat in a gondola and know exactly what would happen, where the fare-box was and everything, and whether they took Swiss silver, and if a gentleman in a crowded gondola was expected to give up his seat to a lady and stand. Poppa, as a stranger and unaccustomed to the motion, hoped this would not be the case, but I knew him well enough to predict that if it were so he would vindicate American gallantry at all risks.

Thus it was that, from the moment momma put her head out of the car window, after Mestre, and exclaimed, "It's getting wateryer and wateryer," Venice was a source of the completest joy and satisfaction to both my parents. Dicky and I took it with the more moderate appreciation natural to our years, but it gave us the greatest pleasure to watch the simple and unrestrained delight of momma and poppa, and to revert, as it were, in their experience, to what our own enjoyment might have been had we been born when they were. "No express agents, no delivery carts, no baggage checks," murmured poppa, as our trunks glided up to the hotel steps, "but it gets there all the same." This was the keynote of his admiration—everything got there all the same. The surprise of it was repeated every time anything got there, and was only dashed once when we saw brown-paper parcels being delivered by a boy at the back door of the Palazzo Balbi, who had evidently walked all the way. The Senator commented upon that boy and his groceries as an inconsistency, and thereafter carefully closed his eyes to the fact that even our own hotel, which faced upon the Grand Canal, had communications to the rear by which its guests could explore a large part of commercial Venice without going in a gondola at all. The canals were the only highways he would recognise, and he went three times to St. Maria della Salute, which was immediately opposite, for the sake of crossing the street in the Venetian way. Momma became really hopeful about the stimulus to his imagination; she told him so. "It appeals to you, Alexander," she said. "Its poetry comes home to you—you needn't deny it;" and poppa cordially admitted it. "Yes," he said, "Ruskin, according to the guide-book, doesn't seem as if he could say too much about this city, and Bramley was just the same. They're both right, and if we were going to be here long enough I'd be like that myself. There's something about it that makes you willing to take a lot of trouble to describe it. There's no use saying it's the canals, or the reflections in the water, or the bridges, or the pigeons, or the gargoyles, or the gondolas——"

"Or Salviati, or Jesurum," said momma, in lighter vein.

"Your memory, Augusta, for the names of old masters is perfectly wonderful," continued poppa placidly. "Or Salviati, or Jesurum, or what. But there's a kind of local spell about this place——"

"There are various kinds of local smells," interrupted Dicky, whom Mrs. Portheris still evaded, but this levity received no encouragement from the Senator. He said instead that he hadn't noticed them himself. For his part he had come to Venice to use his eyes, not his nose; and Dicky, thus discouraged, faded visibly upon his stem.

I could see that poppa was still strongly under the influence of the Venetian sentiment when he invited me to go out in a gondola with him after dinner, and pointedly neglected to suggest that either momma or Dicky should come too. I had a presentiment of his intention. If I have seemed, thus far, to omit all reference to Mr. Page in Boston, since we left Paris, it is, first, because I believe it is not considered necessary in a book of travels to account for every half hour, and second, because I privately believed him to be in correspondence with the Senator the whole time, and hesitated to expose his duplicity. I had given poppa opportunities for confessing this clandestine business, but in his paternal wisdom he had not taken them. I was not prepared, therefore, to be very responsive when, from a mere desire to indulge his sense of the fitness of things, poppa endeavoured to probe my sentiments with regard to Mr. Page by moonlight on the Grand Canal. To begin with, I wasn't sure of them—so much depended upon what Arthur had been doing; and besides, I felt that the perfect confidence which should exist between father and daughter had already been a good deal damaged at the paternal end. So when poppa said that it must seem to me like a dream, so much had happened since the day momma and I left Chicago at twenty-four hours' notice, six weeks ago, I said no, for my part I had felt pretty wide awake all the time; a person had to be, I ventured to add, with no more time to waste upon Southern Europe than we had.

"You mean you've been sleeping pretty badly," said the Senator sympathetically.

"Where was it," I inquired, "you would give us pounded crabs and cream for supper after we'd been to hear masses for the repose of somebody's soul? That was a bad night, but I don't think I've had any others. On the contrary."

"Oh, well," said poppa, "it's a good thing it isn't undermining your constitution," but he looked as if it were rather a disappointment.

"The American constitution can stand a lot of transportation," I remarked. "Railways live on that fact. I've heard you say so yourself, Senator."

Then there was an interval during which the oars of the gondoliers dipped musically, and the moon made a golden pathway to the marble steps of the Palazzo Contarina. Then poppa said, "I refer to the object of our tour."

"The object of our tour wasn't to undermine my constitution," I replied. "It was to write a book—don't you remember. But it's some time since you made any suggestions. If you don't look out, the author of that volume will practically be momma."

The Senator allowed himself to be diverted. "I think," he said, "you'd better leave the chapter on Venice to me; you can't just talk anyhow about this city. I'll write it one of these nights before I go to bed."

"But the main reason," he continued, "that sent us to glide this minute over the canal system of the Bride of the Adriatic was the necessity of bracing you up after what you'd been through."

"Well," I said, "it's been very successful. I'm all braced up. I'm glad we have had such a good excuse for coming." A fib is sometimes necessary to one's self-respect.

"Preme!" cried the gondolier, and we shaved past the gondola of a solitary gentleman just leaving the steps of the Hotel Britannia.

"That was a shave!" poppa exclaimed, and added somewhat inconsequently, "You might just as well not speak so loud."

"I've always liked Arty," he continued, as we glided on.

"So have I," I returned cordially.

"He's in many ways a lovely fellow," said poppa.

"I guess he is," said I.

"I don't believe," ventured my parent, "that his matrimonial ideas have cooled down any."

"I hope he may marry well," I said. "Has he decided on Frankie Turner?"

"He has come to no decision that you don't know about. Of course, I have no desire to interfere where it isn't any of my business, but if you wish to gratify your poppa, daughter, you will obey him in this matter, and permit Arthur once more to—to come round evenings as he used to. He is a young man of moderate income, but a very level head, and it is the wish of my heart to see you reconciled."

"Sorry I can't oblige you, poppa," I said. I certainly was not going to have any reconciliation effected by poppa.

"You'd better just consider it, daughter. I don't want to interfere—but you know my desire, my command."

"Senator," said I, "you don't seem to realise that it takes more than a gondola to make a paternal Doge. I've got to ask you to remember that I was born in Chicago. And it's my bed time. Gondolier! Albergo! Andate presto!"

"He seems to understand you," said poppa meekly.

So we dropped Arthur—dropped him, so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he should ever come up again.

But the Senator's joy in Venice found other means of expressing itself. One was an active and disinterested appeal to the gondoliers to be a little less modern in their costume. He approached this subject through the guide with every gondolier in turn, and the smiling impassiveness with which his suggestions were received still causes him wonder and disgust. "I presume," he remonstrated, "you think you earn your living because tourists have got to get from the Accademia to St. Mark's, and from St. Mark's to the Bridge of Sighs, but that's only a quarter of the reason. The other three-quarters is because they like to be rowed there in gondolas by the gondoliers they've read about, and the gondoliers they've read about wore proper gondoliering clothes—they didn't look like East River loafers."

"They are poor men, these gondolieri," remarked the guide. "They cannot afford."

"I am not an infant, my friend. I'm a business man from Chicago. It's a business proposition. Put your gondoliers into the styles they wore when Andrea Dandolo went looting Constantinople, and you'll double your tourist traffic in five years. Twice as many people wanting gondolas, wanting guides, wanting hotel accommodation, buying your coloured glass and lace flounces—why, Great Scott! it would pay the city to do the thing at the public expense. Then you could pass a by-law forbidding gondoliering to be done in any style later than the fifteenth century. Pay you over and over again."

Poppa was in earnest, he wanted it done. He was only dissuaded from taking more active measures to make his idea public by the fact that he couldn't stay to put it through. He was told, of course, how the plain black gondola came to be enforced through the extravagance of the nobles who ruined themselves to have splendid ones, and how the Venetians scrupled to depart from a historic mandate, but he considered this a feeble argument, probably perpetuated by somebody who enjoyed a monopoly in supplying Venice with black paint. "Circumstances alter cases," he declared. "If that old Doge knew that the P. and O. was going to run direct between Venice and Bombay every fortnight this year, he'd tell you to turn out your gondolas silver-gilt!"

Nevertheless, as I say, the Senator's views were coldly received, with one exception. A highly picturesque and intelligent gondolier, whom the guide sought to convert to a sense of the anachronism of his clothes in connection with his calling, promised that if we would give him a definite engagement for next day, he would appear suitably clad. The following morning he awaited us with honest pride in his Sunday apparel, which included violently checked trousers, a hard felt hat, and a large pink tie. The Senator paid him hurriedly and handsomely and dismissed him with as little injury to his feelings as was possible under the circumstances. "Tell him," said poppa to the guide, "to go home and take off those pants. And tell him, do you understand, to rush!"

That same day, in the afternoon, I remember, when we were disembarking for an ice at Florian's, momma directed our attention to two gentlemen in an approaching gondola. "There's something about that man," she said impressively, "I mean the one in the duster, that belongs to the reign of Louis Philippe."

"There is," I responded; "we saw him last in the Petit Trianon. It's Mr. Pabbley and Mr. Hinkson. Two more Transatlantic fellow-travellers. Senator, when we meet them shall we greet them?"

The Senator had a moment of self-expostulation.

"Well, no," he said, "I guess not. I don't suppose we need feel obliged to keep up the acquaintance of every American we come across in Europe. It would take us all our time. But I'd like to ask him what use he finds for a duster in Venice."

"How I wish the Misses Bingham could hear you," I thought, but one should never annoy one's parents unnecessarily, so I kept my reflections to myself.



CHAPTER XX.

That last day in Venice we went, I remember, to the Lido. Nothing happened, but I don't like leaving it out, because it was the last day, and the next best thing to lingering in Venice is lingering on it. We went in a steamboat, under protest from poppa, who said it might as well be Coney Island until we got there, when he admitted points of difference, and agreed that if people had to come all the way out in gondolas, certain existing enterprises might as well go out of business. The steamer was full of Venetians, and we saw that they were charming, though momma wishes it to be understood that the modern Portia wears her bodice cut rather too low in the neck and gazes much too softly at the modern Bassanio. Poppa and I thought it mere amiability that scorned to conceal itself, but momma referred to it otherwise, admitting, however, that she found it fascinating to watch.

We seemed to disembark at a restaurant permanent among flowing waters, so prominent was this feature of the island, but it had only a roof, and presently we noticed a little grass and some bushes as well. The verdure had quite a novel look, and we decided to discourage the casual person who wished to sell us strange and uncertified shell fish from a basket for immediate consumption, and follow it up.

Dicky was of opinion that we might arrive at the vegetable gardens of Venice, but in this we were disappointed. We came instead to a street-car, and half a mile of arbour, and all the Venetians pleasurably preparing to take carriage exercise. The horses seemed to like the idea of giving it to them, they were quite light-hearted, one of them actually pawed. They were the only horses in Venice, they felt their dignity and their responsibility in a way foreign to animals in the public service, anywhere else in the world. Personally we would have preferred to walk to the other end of the arbour, but it would have seemed a slight, and, as the Senator said, we weren't in Venice to hurt anybody's feelings that belonged there. It would have been extravagant too, since the steamboat ticket included the drive at the end. So we struggled anxiously for good places, and proceeded to the other side with much circumstance, enjoying ourselves as hard as possible. Dicky said he never had such a good time; but that was because he had exhausted Venice and his patience, and was going on to Verona next day.

The arbour and the grass and the street-car track ended sharply and all together at a raised wooden walk that led across the sand to a pavilion hanging over the Adriatic, and here we sat and watched other Venetians disporting themselves in the water below. They were glorious creatures, and they disported themselves nobly, keeping so well in view of the pavilion and such a steady eye upon the spectators that poppa had an impulsive desire to feed them with macaroons. He decided not to; you never could tell, he said, what might be considered a liberty by foreigners; but he had a hard struggle with the temptation, the aquatic accomplishments we saw were so deserving of reward. I had the misfortune to lose a little pink rose overboard, as it were, and Dicky looked seriously annoyed when an amphibious young Venetian caught it between his lips. I don't know why; he was one of the most attractive on view, but I have often noticed Turkish tendencies in Dicky where his country-women are concerned. We came away almost immediately after, so that rose will bloom in my memory, until I forget about it, among romances that might have been.

Strolling back, we bought a Venetian secret for a sou or two, a beautiful little secret, I wonder who first found it out. A picturesque and fishy smelling person in a soft felt hat sold it to us—a pair of tiny dainty dried sea-horses, "mere" and "pere" he called them. And there, all in the curving poise of their little heads and the twist of their little tails, was revealed half the art of Venice, and we saw how the first glass worker came to be told to make a sea green dragon climbing over an amber yellow bowl, and where the gondola borrowed its grace. They moved us to unanimous enthusiasm, and we utterly refused to let Dicky put one in his button-hole.

It is looking back upon Venice, too, that I see the paternal figure of the Senator nourishing the people with octopuses. This may seem improbable, but it is strictly true. They were small octopuses, not nearly large enough to kill anybody while they were alive, though boiled and pickled they looked very deadly. Pink in colour, they stood in a barrel near the entrance, I remember, of Jesurum's, and attracted the Senator's inquiring eye. When the guide said they were for human consumption poppa looked at him suspiciously and offered him one. He ate it with a promptness and artistic despatch that fascinated us all, gathering it up by its limp long legs and taking bites out of it, as if it were an apple. A one-eyed man who hooked pausing gondolas up to the slippery steps offered to show how it should be done, and other performers, all skilled, seemed to rise from the stones of the pavement. Poppa invited them all, by pantomime, to walk up and have an octopus, and when the crowd began to gather from the side alleys, and the enthusiasm grew too promiscuous, he bought the barrel outright and watched the carnival from the middle of the canal. He often speaks of his enjoyment of the Venetian octopus, eaten in cold blood, without pepper, salt, or vinegar; and the effect, when I am not there, is awe-stricken.

Next morning we took a gondola for the station, and slipped through the gold and opal silence of the dawn on the canals away from Venice. No one was up but the sun, who did as he liked with the facades and the bridges in the water, and made strange lovelinesses in narrow darkling places, and showed us things in the calli that we did not know were in the world. The Senator was really depressing until he gradually lightened his spirits by working out a scheme for a direct line of steamships between Venice and New York, to be based on an agreement with the Venetian municipality as to garments of legitimate gaiety for the gondoliers, the re-nomination of an annual Doge, who should be compelled to wear his robes whenever he went out of doors, and the yearly resurrection of the ancient ceremony of marrying Venice to the Adriatic, during the months of July and August, when the tide of tourist traffic sets across the Atlantic. "We should get every school ma'am in the Union, to begin with," said poppa confidently, and by the time we reached Verona he had floated the company, launched the first ship, arrived in Venice with full orchestral accompaniment, and dined the imitation Doge—if he couldn't get Umberto and Crispi—upon clam chowder and canvas-backs to the solemn strains of Hail Columbia played up and down the Grand Canal. "If it could be worked," said poppa as we descended upon the platform, "I'd like to have the Pope telephone us a blessing on the banquet."



CHAPTER XXI.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and momma, having spent the morning among the tombs of the Scaligeri, was lying down. The Scaligeri somehow had got on her nerves; there were so many of them, and the panoply of their individual bones was so imposing.

"Daughter," she had said to me on the way back to the hotel, "if you point out another thing to me I'll slap you." In that frame of mind it was always best to let momma lie down. The Senator had letters to write; I think he wanted to communicate his Venetian steamship idea to a man in Minneapolis. Dicky had already been round to the Hotel di Londres—we were at the Colomba—and had found nothing, so when he asked me to come out for a walk I prepared to be steeped in despondency. An unsuccessful love affair is a severe test of friendship; but I went.

It was as I expected. Having secured a spectator to wreak his gloom upon, Mr. Dod proceeded to make the most of the opportunity. He put his hat on recklessly, and thrust his hands into his pa—his trouser pockets. We were in a strange town, but he fastened his eyes moodily upon the pavement, as if nothing else were worth considering. As we strolled into the Piazza Bra, I saw him gradually and furtively turn up his coat-collar, at which I felt obliged to protest.

"Look here, Dicky," I said, "unrequited affection is, doubtless, very trying, but you're too much of an advertisement. The Veronese are beginning to stare at you; their sorcerers will presently follow you about with their patent philters. Reform your personal appearance, or here, at the foot of this statue of Victor Emmanuel, I leave you to your fate."

Dicky reformed it, but with an air of patience under persecution which I found hard to bear. "I don't know your authority for calling it unrequited," he said, with dignity.

"All right—undelivered," I replied. "That is a noble statue—you can't contradict the guide-book. By Borghi."

"Victor Emmanuel, is it? Then it isn't Garibaldi. You don't have to travel much in Italy to know it's got to be either one or the other. What they like is to have both," said Mr. Dod, with unnecessary bitterness. "I'd enjoy something fresh in statues myself." Then, with an imperfectly-concealed alertness, "There seems to be something going on over there," he added.

We could see nothing but an arched door in a high, curving wall, and a stream of people trickling in. "Probably only one of their eternal Latin church services," continued Dicky. "It's about the only form of public entertainment you can depend on in this country. But we might as well have a look in." He went on to say, as we crossed the dusty road, that my unsympathetic attitude was enough to drive anybody to the Church of Rome, even in the middle of the afternoon.

But we perceived at once that it was not the Church of Rome, or any other church. There was more than one arched entrance, and a man in each, to whom people paid a lira apiece for admission, and when we followed them in we found our feet still upon the ground, and ourselves among a forest of solid buttresses and props. The number XV. was cut deep over the door we came in by, and the props had the air of centuries of patience. A wave of sound seemed to sweep round in a circle inside and spend itself about us, of faint multitudinous clappings. Conviction descended upon us suddenly, and as we stumbled after the others we shared one classic moment of anticipation, hurrying and curious in 1895 as the Romans hurried and were curious in 110, a little late for the show in the Arena. They were all there before us, they had taken the best places, and sat, as we emerged in our astonishment, tier above tier to the row where the wall stopped and the sky began, intent, enthusiastic. The wall threw a new moon of shadow on the west, and there the sun struck down sharply and made splendid the dyes in the women's clothes, and turned the Italian soldiers' buttons into flaming jewels. And again, as we stared, the applause went round and up, from the yellow sand below to the blue sky above, and when we looked bewildered down into the Arena for the victorious gladiator, and saw a tumbling clown with a painted face instead, the illusion was only half destroyed. We climbed and struggled for better places, treading, I fear, in our absorption on a great many Veronese toes. Dicky said when we got them that you had to remember that the seats were Roman in order to appreciate them, they were such very cold stone, and they sloped from back to front, for the purpose, as we found out afterward from the guide-book, of letting off the rain water. We were glad to understand it, but Dicky declared that no explanation would induce him to take a season ticket for the Arena, it was too destitute of modern improvements. It was something, though, to sit there watching, with the ranged multitude, a show in a Roman Amphitheatre—one could imagine things, lictors and aediles, senators and centurions. It only required the substitution of togas and girdled robes for trousers and petticoats, and a purple awning for the emperor, and a brass-plated body-guard with long spears and hairy arms and legs, and a few details like that. If one half closed one's eyes it was hardly necessary to imagine. I was half closing my eyes, and wondering whether they had Vestal Virgins at this particular amphitheatre, and trying to remember whether they would turn their thumbs up or down when they wished the clown to be destroyed, when Dicky grew suddenly pale and sprang to his feet.

"I was afraid it might give one a chill," I said, "but it is very picturesque. I suppose the ancient Romans brought cushions."

Mr. Dod did not appear to hear me.

"In the third row below," he exclaimed, blushing joyfully, "the sixth from this end—do you see? Yellow bun under a floral hat—Isabel!"

"A yellow bun under a floral hat," I repeated, "that would be Isabel, if you add a good complexion and a look of deportment. Yes, now I see her. Mrs. Portheris on one side, Mr. Mafferton on the other. What do you want to do?"

"Assassinate Mafferton," said Dicky. "Does it look to you as if he had been getting there at all."

"So far as one can see from behind, I should say he has made some progress, but I don't think, Dicky, that he has arrived. He is constitutionally slow," I added, "about arriving."

At that moment the party rose. Without a word we, too, got on our feet and automatically followed, Dicky treading the reserved seats of the court of Berengarius as if they had been the back rows of a Bowery theatre. The classics were wholly obscured for him by a floral hat and a yellow bun. I, too, abandoned my speculations cheerfully, for I expected Mrs. Portheris, confronted with Dicky, to be more entertaining than any gladiator.

We came up with them at the exit, and that august lady, as we approached, to our astonishment, greeted us with effusion.



"We thought," she declared, "that we had lost you altogether. This is quite delightful. Now we must reunite!" Dicky was certainly included. It was extraordinary. "And your dear father and mother," went on Mrs. Portheris, "I am longing to hear their experiences since we parted. Where are you? The Colomba? Why what a coincidence! We are there, too! How small the world is!"

"Then you have only just arrived," said Mr. Dod to Miss Portheris, who had turned away her head, and was regarding the distant mountains.

"Yes."

"By the 11.30 p.m.?"

"No. By the 2.30 p.m."

"Had you a pleasant journey up from Naples?"

"It was rather dusty."

I saw that something quite awful was going on and conversed volubly with Mrs. Portheris and Mr. Mafferton to give Dicky a chance, but in a moment I, too, felt a refrigerating influence proceeding from the floral hat and the bun for which I could not account.

"Where have you been?" inquired Dicky, "if I may ask."

"At Vallombrosa."

There was also a parasol and it twisted indifferently.

"Ah—among the leaves! And were they as thick as William says they are?"

"I don't understand you." And, indeed, this levity assorted incomprehensively with the black despair that sat on Dicky's countenance. It was really very painful in spite of Mrs. Portheris's unusual humanity and Mr. Mafferton's obvious though embarrassed joy, and as Mrs. Portheris's cab drove up at the moment I made a tentative attempt to bring the interview to a close. "Mr. Dod and I are walking," I said.

"Ah, these little strolls!" exclaimed Mrs. Portheris, with benignant humour. "I suppose we must condone them now!" and she waved her hand, rolling away, as if she gave us a British matron's blessing.

"Oh, don't!" I cried. "Don't condone them—you mustn't!" But my words fell short in a cloud of dust, and even Dicky, wrapped in his tragedy, failed to receive an impression from them.

"How," he demanded passionately, "do you account for it?"

"Account for what?" I shuffled.

"The size of her head—the frost—the whole bally conversation!" propounded Dicky, with tears in his eyes.

I have really a great deal of feeling, and I did not rebuke these terms. Besides, I could see only one way out of it, and I was occupied with the best terms in which to present it to Dicky. So I said I didn't know, and reflected.

"She isn't the same girl!" he groaned.

"Men are always talking in the funny columns of the newspapers," I remarked absently, "about how much better they can throw a stone and sharpen a pencil than we can."

Mr. Dod looked injured. "Oh, well," he said, "if you prefer to talk about something else——"

"But they can't see into a sentimental situation any further than into a board fence," I continued serenely. "My dear Dick, Isabel thinks you're engaged. So does her mamma. So does Mr. Mafferton."

"Who to?" exclaimed Mr. Dod, in ungrammatical amazement.

"I looked at him reproachfully. Don't be such an owl!" I said.

Light streamed in upon Dicky's mind. "To you!" he exclaimed. "Great Scott!"

"Preposterous, isn't it?" I said.

"I should ejaculate! Well, no, I mean—I shouldn't ejaculate, but—oh, you know what I mean——"

"I do," I said. "Don't apologise."

"What in my aunt's wardrobe do they think that for?"

"You left their party and joined ours rather abruptly at Pompeii," I said.

"Had to!"

"Isabel didn't know you had to. If she tried to find out, I fancy she was told little girls shouldn't ask questions. It was Lot's wife who really came between you, but Isabel wouldn't have been jealous of Lot's wife."

"I suppose not," said Dicky doubtfully.

"Do you remember meeting the Misses Bingham in the Ufizzi? and telling them you were going to be——"

"That's so."

"You didn't give them enough details. And they told me they were going to Vallombrosa. And when Miss Cora said good-bye to me she told me you were a dear or something."

"Why didn't you say I wasn't?"

"Dicky, if you are going to assume that it was my fault——"

"Only one decent hotel—hardly anybody in it—foregathered with old lady Portheris—told every mortal thing they knew! Oh," groaned Dicky. "Why was an old maid ever born!"

"She never was," I couldn't help saying, but I might as well not have said it. Dicky was rapidly formulating his plan of action.

"I'll tell her straight out, after dinner," he concluded, "and her mother, too, if I get a chance."

"Do you know what will happen?" I asked.

"You never know what will happen," replied Dicky, blushing.

"Mrs. and Miss Portheris and Mr. Mafferton will leave the Hotel Colomba for parts unknown, by the earliest train to-morrow morning."

"But Mrs. Portheris declares that we're to be a happy family for the rest of the trip."

"Under the impression that you are disposed of, an impression that might be allowed to——"

"My heart," said Dicky impulsively, "may be otherwise engaged, but my alleged mind is yours for ever. Mamie, you have a great head."

"Thanks," I said. "I would certainly tell the truth to Isabel, as a secret, but——"

"Mamie, we cut our teeth on the same——"

"Horrid of you to refer to it."

"It's such a tremendous favour!"

"It is."

"But since you're in it, you know, already—and it's so very temporary—and I'll be as good as gold——"

"You'd better!" I exclaimed. And so it was settled that the fiction of Dicky's and my engagement should be permitted to continue to any extent that seemed necessary until Mr. Dod should be able to persuade Miss Portheris to fly with him across the Channel and be married at a Dover registry office. We arranged everything with great precision, and, if necessary, I was to fly too, to make it a little more proper. We were both somewhat doubtful about the necessity of a bridesmaid in a registry office, but we agreed that such a thing would go a long way towards persuading Isabel to enter it.

When we arrived at the hotel we found Mrs. Portheris and Mr. Mafferton affectionately having tea with my parents. Isabel had gone to bed with a headache, but Dicky, notwithstanding, displayed the most unfeeling spirits. He drove us all finally to see the tomb of Juliet in the Vicolo Franceschini, and it was before that uninspiring stone trough full of visiting cards, behind a bowling green of suburban patronage, that I heard him, on general grounds of expediency, make contrite advances to Mrs. Portheris.

"I think I ought to tell you," he said, "that my views have undergone a change since I saw you."

Mrs. Portheris fixed her pince nez upon him in suspicious inquiry.

"I can even swallow the whale now," he faltered, "like Jonah."



CHAPTER XXII.

After two days of the most humid civility Mrs. Portheris had brought momma round. It was not an easy process, momma had such a way of fanning herself and regarding distant objects; and Dicky and I observed its difficulties with great satisfaction, for a family matter would be the last thing anybody would venture to discuss with momma under such circumstances, and we very much preferred that Mrs. Portheris's overflowing congratulations should be chilled off as long as possible. Dicky was for taking my parents into our confidence as a measure of preparation, but with poppa's commands upon me with regard to Arthur, I felt a delicacy as to the subject of engagements generally. Besides, one never can tell whether one's poppa and momma would back one up in a thing like that.

I never could quite understand Mrs. Portheris's increasingly good opinion of us at this point. The Senator declared that it was because some American shares of hers had gone up in the market, but that struck momma and me as somewhat too general in its application. I preferred to attribute it to the Senator's Tariff Bill. Mr. Mafferton brought us the Times one evening in Verona, and pointed out with solemn congratulation that the name of J.P. Wick was mentioned four times in the course of its leading article. That journal even said in effect that, if it were not for the faithfully sustained anti-humorous character which had established it for so many generations in the approbation of the British public, it would go so far as to call the contemplated measure "Wicked legislation." Mr. Mafferton could not understand why poppa had no desire to cut out the article. He said there was something so interesting about seeing one's name in print—he always did it. I was very curious to see instances of Mr. Mafferton's name in print, and finally induced him to show them to me. They were mainly advertisements for lost dogs—"Apply to the Hon. Charles Mafferton," and the reward was very considerable.

But this has nothing to do with the way the plot thickened on the Lake of Como. I was watching Bellagio slip past among the trees on the left shore and wondering whether we could hear the nightingales if it were not for the steamer's engines—which was particularly unlikely as it was the middle of the afternoon—and thinking about the trifles that would sometimes divide lives plainly intended to mingle. Mere enunciation, for example, was a thing one could so soon become reaccustomed to; already momma had ceased to congratulate me on my broad a's, and I could not help the inference that my conversation was again unobtrusively Chicagoan. It was frustrating, too, that I had no way of finding out how much poppa knew, and extremely irritating to think that he knew anything. He was sitting near me as I mused, immersed in the American mail, while momma and his Aunt Caroline insensibly glided towards intimacy again on two wicker chairs close by. Mr. Mafferton was counting the luggage somewhere; he was never happy on a steamer until he had done that; and Isabel was being fervently apologised to by Dicky on the other side of the deck. I hoped she was taking it in the proper spirit. I had the terms all ready in which I should accept an apology, if it were ever offered to me.



"Now, I must not put off any longer telling you how delighted I am at your dear Mamie's re-engagement."

The statement reached us all, though it was intended for momma only. Even Mrs. Portheris's more amiable accents had a quality which penetrated far, with a suggestion of whiskers. I looked again languidly at Bellagio, but not until I had observed a rapid glance between my parents, recommending each other not to be taken by surprise.

"Has she confided in you?" inquired momma.

"No—no. I heard it in a roundabout way. You must be very pleased, dear Augusta. Such an advantage that they have known each other all their lives!"

Poppa looked guardedly round at me, but by this time I was asleep in my camp chair, the air was so balmily cool after our hot rattle to Como.

"How did you hear?" he demanded, coming straight to the point, while momma struggled after tentative uncertainties.

"Oh, a little bird, a little bird—who had it from them both! And much better, I said when I heard it, that she should marry one of her own country-people. American girls nowadays will so often be content with nothing less than an Englishman!"

"So far as that goes," said the Senator crisply, "we never buy anything we haven't a use for, simply because it's cheap. But I don't mind telling you that my daughter's re-engagement, on the old American lines, is a thing I've been wanting to happen for some time."

"And there are some really excellent points about Mr. Dod. We must remember that he is still very young. He has plenty of time to repair his fortunes. Of one thing we may be sure," continued Mrs. Portheris magnanimously, "he will make her a very kind husband."

At this I opened my eyes inadvertently—nobody could help it—and saw the barometrical change in poppa's countenance. It went down twenty degrees with a run, and wore all the disgust of an hon. gentleman who has jumped to conclusions and found nothing to stand on.

"Oh, you're away off there, Aunt Caroline," he said with some annoyance. "Better sell your little bird and buy a telephone. Richard Dod is no more engaged to our daughter than the man in the moon."

"Well, I should say not!" exclaimed momma.

"I have it on the best authority," insisted Mrs. Portheris blandly. "You American parents are so seldom consulted in these matters. Perhaps the young people have not told you."

This was a nasty one for both the family and the Republic, and I heard the Senator's rejoinder with satisfaction.

"We don't consider, in the United States, that we're the natural bullies of our children because we happen to be a little older than they are," he said, "but for all that we're not in the habit of hearing much news about them from outsiders. I'll have to get you to promise not to go spreading such nonsense around, Aunt Caroline."

"Oh, of course, if you say so, but I should be better satisfied if she denied it herself," said Mrs. Portheris with suavity. "My information was so very exact."

I had slumbered again, but it did not avail me. I heard the American mail dispersing itself about the deck in all directions as the Senator rose, strode towards my chair, and shook me much more vigorously than there was any necessity for.

"Here's Aunt Caroline," he said, "wanting us to believe that you and Dicky Dod are engaged—you two that have quarrelled as naturally as brother and sister ever since you were born. I guess you can tell her whether it's very likely!"

I yawned, to gain time, but the widest yawn will not cover more than two seconds.

"What an extraordinary question!" I said. It sounds weak, but that was the way one felt.

"Don't prevaricate, Mamie, love," said Mrs. Portheris sternly.

"I'm not—I don't. But n-nothing of the kind is announced, is it?" I was growing nervous under the Senatorial eye.

"Nothing of the kind exists," said poppa, the Doge all over, except his umbrella. "Does it?"

"Why no," I said. "Dicky and I aren't engaged. But we have an understanding."

I was extremely sorry. Mrs. Portheris was so triumphant, and poppa allowed his irritation to get so much the better of him.

"Oh," he said, "you've got an understanding! Well, you've been too intelligent, darned if you haven't!" The Senator pulled his beard in his most uncompromising manner. "Now you can understand something more. I'm not going to have it. You haven't got my consent and you're not going to get it."

"But, my dear nephew, the match is so suitable in every respect! Surely you would not stand in the way of a daughter's happiness when both character and position—position in Chicago, of course, but still—are assured!"

Poppa paused, uncertain for an instant whether to turn his wrath upon his aunt, and that, of course, was my opportunity to plead with my angry parent. But the knowledge that the hopes which poppa was reducing to dust and ashes were fervently fixed on a floral hat and a yellow bun over which he had no control, on the other side of the ship, overcame me, and I looked at Bellagio to hide my emotions instead, in a way which they might interpret as obstinate, if they liked.

"Aunt Caroline," said the Senator firmly, "I'll thank you to keep your spoon out of the preserves. My daughter knows where I have given her hand, and that's the direction she's going with her feet. Mary, I may as well inform you that the details of your wedding are being arranged in Chicago this minute. It will take place within three weeks of our arrival, and it won't be any slump. But Richard Dod might as well be told right now that he won't be in it, unless in the capacity of usher. As I don't contemplate breaking up this party and making things disagreeable all round, you'll have to tell him yourself. We sail from Liverpool"—poppa looked at his watch—"precisely one week and four hours from now, and if Mr. Dod has not agreed to the conditions I mention by that time we will leave him upon the shore. That's all I have to say, and between now and then I don't expect you or anybody else to have the nerve to mention the matter to me again."

After that it was impossible to wink at poppa, or in any way to give him the assurance that my regard for him was unimpaired. There are things that can't be passed over with a smile in one's poppa without doing him harm, and this was one of them. It was a regular manifesto, and I felt exactly like Lord Salisbury. I couldn't take him seriously, and yet I had to tell him to come on, if he wanted to, and devote his spare time to learning the language of diplomacy. So I merely bowed with what magnificence I could command and filed it, so to speak; and walked to the other side of the deck, leaving poppa to his conscience and momma and his Aunt Caroline. I left him with confidence, not knowing which would give him the worst time. Mrs. Portheris began it, before I was out of earshot. "For an American parent," she said blandly, "it strikes me, Joshua, that you are a little severe."

I found Mr. Mafferton interfering, as I expected, with Dicky and Isabel in their appreciation of the west shore. He was pointing out the Villa Carlotta at Caddenabbia, and explaining the beauties of the sculptures there and dwelling on the tone of blue in the immediate Alps and reminding them that the elder Pliny once picked wild flowers on these banks, and generally making himself the intelligent nuisance that nature intended him to be. In spite of it Isabel was radiant. She said a number of things with the greatest ease; one saw that language, after all, was not difficult to her, she only wanted practice and an untroubled mind. I looked at Dicky and saw that a weight had been removed from his, and it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that peace and satisfaction in this life would date for these two, if all went well for the next few days, from the Lake of Como. But all could not be relied upon to go well so long as Mr. Mafferton hovered, quoting Claudian on the mulberry tree, upon the brink of a proposal, so I took him away to translate his quotation for me in the stern, which naturally suggested the past and its emotions. We could now refer quite sympathetically to the altogether irretrievable and gone by, and Mr. Mafferton was able to mention Lady Torquilan without any trace of his air that she was a person, poor dear, that brought embarrassment with her. Indeed, I sometimes thought he dragged her in. I asked him, in appropriate phrases, of course, whether he had decided to accept Mrs. Portheris's daughter, and he fixed mournful eyes upon me and said he thought he had, almost. The news of my engagement to Mr. Dod had apparently done much to bring him to a conclusion; he said it pointed so definitely to the unlikelihood of his ever being able to find a more stimulating companion than Miss Portheris, with all her charms, was likely to prove. It was difficult, of course, to see the connection, but I could not help confiding to Mr. Mafferton, as a secret, that there was hardly any chance of my union with Dicky—after what poppa had said. When I assured him that I had no intention whatever of disobeying my parent in a matter of which he was so much better qualified to be a judge than I, it was impossible not to see Mr. Mafferton's good opinion of me rising in his face. He said he could not help sympathising with the paternal view, but that was all he would say; he refrained magnificently from abusing Dicky. And we parted mutually more deeply convinced than ever of the undesirability of doing anything rash in the all important direction we had been discussing.