Page:Wha Katy Did Next - Coolidge (1886).djvu/243

 Katy once. "He is so sweet that I don't Miss you and mamma very much while I have him to play with. I call him Florio,—don't you think that is a pretty name? I like to stay with him a great deal better than to go about with you to those nasty-smelling old churches, with fleas hopping all over them!"

So Amy was left in peace with her fawn, and the others made haste to see all they could before the time came to go to Florence.

Katy realized one of the "moments" for which she had come to Europe when she stood for the first time on the balcony overhanging the Corso, which Mrs. Ashe had hired in company with some acquaintances made at the hotel, and looked down at the ebb and surge of the just-begun Carnival. The narrow street seemed humming with people of all sorts and conditions. Some were masked; some were not. There were ladies and gentlemen in fashionable clothes, peasants in the gayest costumes, surprised-looking tourists in tall hats and linen dusters, harlequins, clowns, devils, nuns, dominoes of every color,—red,