Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/147



us and lead us back to the waxflowers of our choice.

The household consisted of the landlord and his wife, together with the signorina and a "boots"—who must have stayed in the well, for occasionally we heard his hollow voice coming up from a great depth below. The housemaid was a pretty girl, and though her position in life did not entitle her to the courtesy of "signorina," she swished about with such a rush of starched petticoats, and was so amiably inattentive, that we gave her more than her due. In the big dining-hall which we shared with a German artist and his wife, and a French lady who was studying the frescos in the churches, she played with a pet fox while waiting to change the plates, and called down into the square to her companions—girls with less rustle to their skirts, perhaps, but more freedom. As for the landlord, he divided his time between the kitchen at the back of the hotel and the dining-room windows, balancing himself gracefully on the sill every time he heard the sound of wheels. At times he would hurl a platter of spaghetti towards the table on the way to the window, but he never stopped to serve us save when a fresh bottle of wine was to be opened. It was his own wine, of his own bottling, and quite as dear to him as his signora in the kitchen. Afterwards, when we had learned to swing out over the window-sills, and felt the delicious uncertainty of approaching wheels, we found our landlord entirely simpatico, and looked for guests as eagerly as he did.

Apart from the joy of speculation, there was the beauty of the piazza itself. It is not every one whose summer-hotel windows look into a flat-iron square that has not changed one whit in four hundred years. There was a well near the point of the iron, with deep grooves worn in the stone sides from the ropes of centuries—that was the village club, and the sole ornament of the gravelled open space. Tall buildings, purely mediæval, denned the flat-iron; they had once been palaces, though the occupants probably stabled their horses on the ground floor in those days, as they do now. At our left, from