Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 2.djvu/191

Rh gentlemen and ladies drawing each other, and returning delighted with the study of art in "dear Rome."

They went to fancy parties where artists got themselves up like their own statues and pictures, and set mediæval fashions which it was a pity the rest of the world did not follow. They drank much social tea with titled beings, as thick as blackberries, and, better still, men and women who had earned nobler names for themselves with pencil, pen, or chisel. They paid visits in palaces where the horses lived in the basement, rich foreigners on the first floor, artists next, and princes in the attic.

They went to the hunt and saw scarlet coats, fine horses, bad riding, many hounds, and no foxes.

As a change they got up game-parties à la Little Athens in their own small salon, introduced the Potato Pantomime, had charades, and enacted the immortal Jarley's waxworks on one of the Seven Hills.

A true Yankee breakfast of fishballs, johnny-cake, and dip toast, was given in their honor, and its delights much enhanced by its being eaten in a lovely room with reeds and rushes on the pale-green walls, shell-shaped chairs, and coral mirror-frames. What a thing it was to consume those familiar