 CHAPTER VIII. On the track of Ulysses. We are going to follow the track of Ulysses," said Katie, with her eyes fixed on the little traveling map in her guidebook. Do you realize that, Polly dear? He and his companions sailed these very seas before us, and we shall see the sights they saw. Cersei's cape, and the aisles of the sirens, and Polly famous himself, perhaps, who knows. The Marco Polo had just cast off her moorings, and was slowly steaming out of the crowded port of Genoa into the heart of a still, rosy sunset. The water was perfectly smooth. No motion could be felt but the engines throb. The trembling foam of the long wake showed glancing points of phosphorescence here and there, while low on the eastern sky a great silver planet burned like a signal lamp. Polly famous was a horrible giant. I read about him once, and I don't want to see him, observed Amy, from her safe protective perch in her mother's lap. He may not be so bad now as he was in those old times. Some missionary may have come across him and converted him. If he were good, you wouldn't mind his being big, would you? Suggested Katie. No, replied Amy doubtfully, but it would take a great lot of missionaries to make him good, I should think. One all alone would be afraid to speak to him. We shouldn't really see him, shall we? I don't believe we shall, and if we stuff cotton in our ears and look the other way we'd need not hear the sirens sing, said Katie, who was in the highest spirits. And oh, Polly dear, there's one delightful thing I forgot to tell you about. The captain says he shall stay in Lake Horn all day tomorrow taking on freight, and we shall have plenty of time to run up to Pisa and see the Cathedral and the Leaning Tower and everything else. Now, that is something Ulysses didn't do. I'm so glad I didn't die of measles when I was little, as Rose-Red used to say. She gave her book a toss into the air as she spoke, and caught it again as it fell, very much as the Katie Carr of twelve years ago might have done. What a child you are, said Mrs. Ash approvingly. You never seem out of sorts or tired of things. Out of sorts? I should think not, and pray why should I be, Polly dear? Katie had taken to calling her friend Polly dear of late, a trick picked up half unconsciously from Lieutenant Ned. Mrs. Ash liked it. It was sisterly and intimate, she said, and made her feel nearer Katie's age. Does the Tower really lean? Question Amy. Far over, I mean, so that we can see it? We shall know tomorrow, replied Katie, if it doesn't I shall lose all my confidence in human nature. Katie's confidence in human nature was not doomed to be impaired. There stood the famous Tower when they reached the Palace del Duomo in Pisa next morning, looking all aslamped exactly as it does in the pictures and alabaster models, and seeming as if in another moment it must topple over from its own weight upon their heads. Mrs. Ash declared that it was so unnatural that it made her flesh creep, and when she was coaxed up the winding staircase to the top, she turned so giddy that they were all thankful to get her safely down to firm ground again. She turned her back upon the Tower as they crossed the grassy space to the majestic Old Cathedral, saying that if she thought about it any more she should become a disbeliever in the attraction of gravitation, which she had always been told all respectable people must believe in. The guide showed them the lamp swinging by a long slender chain before which Galileo is said to have sat and pondered while he worked out his theory of the pendulum. This lamp seemed a sort of own cousin to the attraction of gravitation, and they gazed upon it with respect. Then they went to the baptistry to see Nicolo Pissano's magnificent pulpit of creamy marble, a mass of sculptures supported on the backs of lions, and the equally lovely font, and to admire the extraordinary sound which their guide evoked from a mysterious echo, with which he seemed to be on intimate terms, for he made it say whatever he would and almost answer back. It was in coming out of the baptistry that they met with an adventure which Amy could never quite forget. Pisa is the medical city of Italy, and her streets are infested with a band of religious beggars who call themselves the Brethren of the Order of Mercy. They wear loose black gowns, sandals laced over their bare feet, and black cambrick masks with holes, through which their eyes glare awfully, and they carry tin cups for the reception of offerings, which they thrust into the faces of all strangers visiting the city, whom they look upon as their lawful pray. As our party emerged from the baptistry, two of these brethren aspired them, and like great human bats came swooping down upon them with long strides, their black garments flying in the wind, their eyes rolling strangely behind their masks, and brandishing their alms cups, which had, pour le pavue, let it upon them, and gave forth a clapping sound like a watchman's rattle. There was something terrible in their appearance, and the rushing speed of their movements. Amy screamed a man behind her mother, who visibly shrank. Katie stood her ground, but the bat-winged fiends and dory's illustrations to Dante occurred to her, and her fingers trembled as she dropped some money in the cups. Even medecine friars are human. Katie ceased to tremble as she observed that one of them, as he retreated, walked backward for some distance in order to gaze longer at Mrs. Ash, whose cheeks were flushed with bright pink, and who was looking particularly handsome. She began to laugh instead, and Mrs. Ash laughed too, but Amy could not get over the impression of having been attacked by demons, and often afterwards recurred with a shutter to the time when those awful black things fluid her and she hid behind Mama. The ghastly pictures of the triumph of death, which were presently exhibited to them, on the walls of the Campo Cento, did not tend to reassure her, and it was with quite a pale, scared little face that she walked toward the hotel where they were to have lunch, and she held fast to Katie's hand. Their way led them through a narrow street inhabited by the poor classes, a dusty street with high, shabby buildings on either side and wide doorways giving glimpses of interior courtyards where empty hogsheads and barrels and rusty cauldrons lay, and great wooden trays of macaroni were spread out in the sun to dry. Some of the macaroni was grey, some white, some yellow. None of it looked at all desirable to eat as it lay exposed to the dust with long lines of ill-washed clothes flapping above on wires stretched from one house to another. As is usual in poor streets there were swarms of children, and the appearance of little Amy, with her long bright hair falling over her shoulders, and Mabel, clasped in her arms, created a great sensation. The children in the street shouted and exclaimed, and other children within the houses heard the sounds and came trooping out, while mothers and older sisters peep from the doorways. The very air seemed full of eager faces and little brown and curly heads bobbing up and down with excitement, and black eyes all fixed upon big, beautiful Mabel, who, with her thick wig of flaxen hair, her blue velvet dress and jacket, feathered hat, and little muff, seemed to them like some strange, small marvel from another world. They could not decide whether she was a living child or a make-believe one, and they dared not come near enough to find out, so they clustered at a little distance, pointed with their fingers, and whispered and giggled, while Amy, much pleased with the admiration shown for her darling, lifted Mabel up to view. At last one droll little girl, with a white cap on her round head, seemed to make up her mind, and darting indoors, returned with her doll, a poor little image of wood, its only garment a coarse shirt of red cotton. This she held out for Amy to see. Amy smiled for the first time since her encounter with the bat-like friars, and Katie, taking Mabel from her, made signs that the two dolls should kiss each other. But though the little Italian screamed with laughter at the idea of a baccio between two dolls, she would by no means allow it, and hid her treasure behind her back, blushing and giggling, and saying something very fast which none of them understood, while she waved two fingers at them with a curious gesture. I do believe she is afraid Mabel will cast the evil eye on her doll, said Katie, at last, with a sudden understanding as to what this pantomime meant. Why, you silly thing! cried the outraged Amy. Do you suppose for one moment that my child could hurt your dirty old dolly? You ought to be glad to have her noticed at all by anybody that's clean. The sound of the foreign tongue completed the discomforture of the little Italian. With a shriek she fled, and all the other children after her, pausing at a distance to look back at the alarming creatures who didn't speak the familiar language. Katie, wishing to leave a pleasant impression, made Mabel kiss her waxing fingers toward them. This sent the children off into another fit of laughter and chatter, and they followed our friends for quite a distance as they proceeded on their way to the hotel. All that night, over a sea as smooth as glass, the Marco Polo slipped along the coasts, past which the ships of Ulysses sailed in those old legendary days which were so charmed a light to our modern eyes. Katie roused at three in the morning, and looking from her cabin window had a glimpse of an island which her map showed her must-be-elba, where that war eagle Napoleon was chained for a while. Then she fell asleep again, and when she roused in full daylight the steamer was off the coast of Ostia and nearing the mouth of the Tiber. Dreamy mountain shapes rose beyond the faraway Campania, and every curve and indentation of the coast bore a name which recalled some interesting thing. About eleven a dim drawn bubble appeared on the horizon, which the captain assured them was the Dome of St. Peter's, nearly thirty miles distant. This was one of the moments which Clover had been fond of speculating about, and Katie, contrasting the real with the imaginary moment, could not help smiling. Neither she nor Clover had ever supposed that her first glimpse of the great dome was to be so little impressive. On and on they went till the air-hung bubble disappeared, and Amy, grown very tired of scenery with which she had no associations, and grown up raptures which she did not comprehend, squeezed herself into the end of the long wooden satay on which Katie sat, and began to beg for another story concerning Violet and Emma. Just a little tiny chapter, you know, Miss Katie, about what they did on New Year's Day or something. It's so dull to keep sailing and sailing all day and have nothing to do, and is ever so long since you told me anything about them. Really and truly it is. Now Violet and Emma, if the truth is to be told, had grown to be the bane of Katie's existence. She had wrung the changes on their uneventful adventures, and wracked her brains to invent more and more details till her imagination felt like a dry sponge from which every possible drop of moisture had been squeezed. Amy was insatiable. Her interest in the tale never flagged, and when her exhausted friend explained that she really could not think of another word to say on the subject, she would turn the tables by asking, Then, Miss Katie, may I tell you a chapter? Whereupon she would proceed somewhat in this fashion. It was the day before Christmas. No, we won't have it the day before Christmas. It shall be three days before Thanksgiving. Violet and Emma got up in the morning and, well, they didn't do anything in particular that day. They just had their breakfast and dinners and played and studied a little, and went to bed early, you know. And the next morning, well, there didn't much happen that day either. They just had their breakfast and dinners and played. Listening to Amy's stories was so much worse than telling them to her that Katie in self-defense was driven to recommend her narrations. But she had grown to hate Violet and Emma with a deadly hatred. So when Amy made this appeal on the steamer's deck, a sudden resolution took possession of her, and she decided to put an end to those dreadful children once for all. Yes, Amy, she said, I will tell you one more story about Violet and Emma, but this is positively the last. So Amy cuddled close to her friend and listened with rapt attention as Katie told how on a certain day, just before the new year, Violet and Emma started by themselves in a little sleigh drawn by a pony to carry to a poor woman who lived in a lonely house, high up on a mountain slope, a basket containing a turkey, a mold of cranberry jelly, a bunch of celery and a mince pie. They were so pleased at having all these nice things to take to poor widow Simpson, and in thinking how glad she would be to see them, proceeded the naughty Katie, that they never noticed how black the sky was getting to be, or how the wind howled through the bare boughs of the trees. They had to go slowly, for the road was uphill all the way, and it was hard work for the poor pony. But he was a stout little fellow, and tucked away up the slippery track, and Violet and Emma talked and laughed and never thought what was going to happen. Just halfway up the mountain there was a rocky cliff which overhung the road, and on this cliff grew an enormous hemlock tree. The branches were loaded with snow, which made them much heavier than usual. Just as the sleigh passed slowly underneath the cliff, a violent blast of wind blew up from the ravine, struck the hemlock, and tore it out of the ground, roots and all. It fell directly across the sleigh, and Violet and Emma and the pony and the basket with the turkeys and all the other things in it were all crushed, as flat as pancakes. Well, said Amy, as Katie stopped, go on, what happened then? Nothing happened then, replied Katie, in a tone of awful solemnity. Nothing could happen. Violet and Emma were dead. The pony was dead. The things in the basket were broken all to little bits, and a great snowstorm began and covered them up, and no one knew where they were or what had become of them till the snow melted in the spring. With a loud shriek Amy jumped up from the bench. No. No. No, she cried. They aren't dead. I won't let them be dead. Then she burst into tears, ran down the stairs, locked herself into her mother's stateroom, and did not appear again for several hours. Katie laughed heartily at first over this outburst. But presently she began to repent and to think that she had treated her pet unkindly. She went down and knocked at the stateroom door, but Amy would not answer. She called her softly through the keyhole and coaxed and pleaded, but it was all in vain. Amy remained invisible till late in the afternoon, and when she finally crept up again to the deck, her eyes were red with crying and her little face as pale and miserable as if she had been attending the funeral of her dearest friend. Katie's heart smote her. Come here, my darling, she said, holding out her hand. Come and sit in my lap and forgive me. Violet and Emma shall not be dead. They shall go on living since you care so much for them, and I will tell stories about them to the end of the chapter. No, said Amy, shaking her head mournfully. You can't. They're dead, and they won't come to life again ever. It's all over. And I'm so sorry. All Katie's apologies and efforts to resuscitate the story were useless. Violet and Emma were dead to Amy's imagination, and she could not make herself believe in them any more. She was too wobagon to care for the fables of Cersei and her swine, which Katie told as they rounded the magnificent cello, and the aisles where the sirens used to sing, appealed to her in vain. The sun set, the stars came out, and under the beams of their countless lamps and beckonings of a slender new moon, the Marco Polo sailed into the Bay of Naples, past Vesuvius, whose dusky curl of smoke could be seen outlined against the luminous sky and brought her passengers to their landing place. They woke next morning to a summer atmosphere full of yellow sunshine and true July warmth. Flower vendors stood on every corner and pursued each newcomer with their fragrant wares. Katie could not stop exclaiming over the cheapness of the flowers, which were thrust in at the carriage windows as they drove slowly up and down the streets. They were tied into flat nose gaze, whose center was a white chameleon encircled with concentric rows of pink tea rose buds, ring after ring till the hole was the size of an ordinary milk pan, all to be had for the sum of ten cents. But after they had bought two or three of these enormous bouquets and had discovered that not a single rose boasted an inch of stem and that all were pierced with long wires through their very hearts, she ceased to care for them. I would rather have one souvenir or General Jacques Minot with a long stem and plenty of leaves than a dozen of these stiff platters of bouquets, Katie told Mrs. Ash. But when they drove beyond the city gates and the coachmen came to anchor beneath walls over hung with the same roses, she found that she might stand on the seat and pull down as many branches of the lovely flowers as she desired and gather wallflowers for herself out of the clefts in the masonry. She was entirely satisfied. This is the Italy of my dreams, she said. With all its beauty there was an underlying sense of danger about Naples which interfered with their enjoyment of it. Evil smells came into the windows or confronted them as they went about the city. There seemed something deadly in the air. Whispered reports met their ears of cases of fever which the landlords of the hotels were doing their best to hush up. An American gentleman was said to be lying very ill at one house. A lady had died the week before at another. Mrs. Ash grew nervous. We will just take a rapid look at a few of the principal things, she told Katie, and then get away as fast as we can. Amy is so on my mind that I have no peace of my life. I keep feeling her pulse and imagining that she does not look right. And though I know it is all my fancy, I am impatient to be off. You won't mind, will you, Katie? After that everything they did was done in a hurry. Katie felt as if she were being driven about by a cyclone as they rushed from one site to another, filling up all the chinks between was shopping, which was irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap. She herself purchased a tortoise shelf fan and a chain for rose red, and had her monogram carved upon it. A coral locket for Elsie, some studs for Dory, and for her father a small beautiful vase of bronze copied from one of the Pompeian antiques. How charming it is to have money to spend in such a place as this, she said to herself, with a sigh of satisfaction, as she surveyed these delightful buy-ins. I only wish I could get ten times as many things and take them to ten times as many people. Papa was so wise about it, I can't think how it is that he always knows beforehand exactly how people are going to feel and what they will want. Mrs. Ash also brought to great many things for herself and Amy, and to take home his presents, and it was all very pleasant and satisfactory except for the subtle sense of danger from which they could not escape and which made them glad to go. See Naples and die, says the old adage, and the saying has proved sadly true in the case of many an American traveller. Besides the talk of fever there was also a good deal of gossip about brigands going about, as is generally the case in Naples and its vicinity. Something was said to have happened to a party on one of the heights above Sorrento, and though nobody knew exactly what the something was, or was willing to vouch for the story, Mrs. Ash and Katie felt a good deal of trepidation as they entered the carriage which was to take them to the neighborhood where the mysterious something had occurred. The drive between Castellamara and Sorrento is in reality as safe as it is between Boston and Brookline, but as our party did not know this fact till afterwards it did them no good. It is also one of the most beautiful drives in the world, following the windings of the exquisite coast, mile after mile, in long links of perfectly made road, carved on the face of sharp cliffs, with groves of oranges and lemons and olive orchards above, and the Bay of Naples beneath, stretching away like a solid sheet of lapis lazuli, and gemmed with islands of the most picturesque form. It is a pity that so much beauty should have been wasted on Mrs. Ash and Katie, but they were too frightened to have enjoy it. Their carriage was driven by a shaggy young savage, who looked quite wild enough to be a bandit himself. He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and every now and then gave a shlong shrill whistle. Mrs. Ash was sure that these were signals to his band who were lurking somewhere on the olive-hung hillsides. She thought she detected him once or twice making signs to certain questionable-looking characters as they passed, and she fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of commiseration as upon victims who were being carried to execution. Her fears affected Katie, so though they talked and laughed and made jokes to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party. They were privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of highly superfluous misery. And, after all, they reached serento in perfect safety, and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to be a respectable young man enough with a wife and family to support, who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty cents or so which would enable him to purchase these dainties. Mrs. Ash had a very bad headache the next day to pay for her fright, but she and Katie agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no more attention to unaccredited rumors or allow them to spoil their enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make. Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high into the water, their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the little town of serento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the harbor of the place. Katie was never tired of peering down into this strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are hung with vines and trailing groves of all sorts, and seem all a tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward Massa to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay and to admire the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the roadside, and they always came back loaded with orange flowers which could be picked as freely as apple blossoms from new England orchards in the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of year were very sour, but they answered well for a romantic date from an orange grove as if they had been in the sweetest in the world. They made two different excursions to Pompeii which is within easy distance of serento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills and had glimpses of the faraway Calabrian shore of the natural arch and the temples of Pestum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katie's birthday which fell toward the end of January, Mrs. Ash let her have her choice of a treat and she elected to go to the Isle of Capri which none of them had seen. It turned out a perfect day, with sea and wind exactly right for the sail and to allow of getting into the famous blue grotto which can only be entered under particular conditions of tide and weather, and they climbed the great cliff rise at the island's end and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor Tiberius and the awful place known as his Leap, down which it is said, he made his victims throw themselves and they launched at a hotel which bore his name and just at sunset pushed off again for the row home over the charm sea. This return voyage was almost the pleasantest thing of all the day. The water was smooth and the moon at its full. It was larger more brilliant than the American moons are and seemed to possess an actual warmth and color. The boatmen timed their oar strokes to the cadence of Neapolitan, Baccaroles, and folk songs full of rhythmic movement which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when it last the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing place, Katie drew a long regretful breath and declared that this was her best birthday gift of all, better than Amy's flowers or the pretty tortoise shell locket that Mrs. Ash had given her, better even than the letter from home which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the morning's post to make a bright opening for the day. All pleasant things must come to an end. Katie, said Mrs. Ash, one afternoon in early February, I heard some ladies talking just now in the salon and they said that room is filling up very fast. The carnival begins in less than two weeks and everybody wants to be there then. If we don't make haste we shall not be able to get any rooms. Oh dear, said Katie, it is very trying not to be able to be in two places at once. I want to see Rome dreadfully and yet I cannot bear to leave Sorrento. We've been very happy here, haven't we? So they took up their wandering staves again and departed for Rome, like the Apostle, not knowing what should befall them there. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of what Katie did next. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by B.J. What Katie did next by Susan Colage. Chapter 9 A Roman Holiday Oh dear, said Mrs. Ash, as she folded her letters and laid them aside. I wish those pages would go away from Nice or else that the frigates were not there. Why, what's the matter? asked Katie, looking up from the many leaf journal from Clover over which she was pouring. Nothing is the matter except those everlasting people haven't gone to Spain yet, as they said they would, and Ned seems to keep on seeing them, replied Mrs. Ash petulantly. But, dear Polly, what difference does it make? And they never did promise you to go at any particular time, did they? No, they didn't, but I wish they would. All the same. Not that Ned is such a goose as to really care anything for that foolish Lily. Then she gave a little laugh at her own inconsistency and added, but I oughtn't to abuse her when she is your cousin. Don't mention it, said Katie, cheerfully. But really, I don't see why poor Lily need worry you so much, Polly dear. The room in which this conversation took place was on the very topmost floor of the Hotel del Hondo in Rome. It was large and many windowed, and though there was a little bed in one corner half hidden behind the calico screen with the bureau and a wash stand, and a sort of stout mahogany hat-tree on which Katie's dresses and jackets were hanging, the remaining space with the sofa and easy chairs grouped around a fire, and a round table furnished with books and a lamp was ample enough to make a good substitute for a private sitting room, which Mrs. Ash had not been able to procure on account of the near approach of the carnival, and the consequent crowding of strangers to Rome. In fact, she was assured that under these circumstances she was lucky to find rooms as good as these, and she made the most of the assurance as a consolation for the somewhat unsatisfactory food and service of the Hotel, and the four long flights of stairs which must be passed every time they needed to reach the dining room or the street door. The party had been in Rome only four days, but already they had seen a host of interesting things. They had stood in the strange sunken space with its marble floor and broken columns, which is all that is left of the great Roman Forum. They had visited the Colosseum. At that period still overhung with ivy garlands and trailing greeneries, and not, as now, straight, clean, and bare and tidied out of much of its picturesqueness. They had seen the baths of Caricola and the Temple of Janus and St. Peter's and the Vatican Marbles, and had driven out on the Campania and to the Pamphilla Doria Villa to gather purple and red anemones and to the English cemetery to see the grave of Keats. They had also peeped into certain shops and attended a reception at the American ministers. In short, like most unworn travelers, they had done about twice as much as prudence and experience would have permitted had those worthies been consulted. All the romance of Katie's nature responded to the fascination of the ancient city, the capital of the world, as it may truly be called. The shortest driver walk brought them face to face with innumerable and unexpected delights. Now it was a wonderful fountain, with plunging horses and colossal nymphs and tritons, holding cups and horns from which showers of white foam rose high in the air to fall like Russian grain into an immense marble basin. Now it was an arched doorway with traceries as fine as lace, sole remaining fragment of an heathen temple, flung and stranded as it were by the waves of time on the squalid shore of the present. Now it was a shrine at the meeting of three streets, where a dim lamp burned beneath the effigy of the Madonna, with always a fresh rose beside it in a vase, its foot, a peasant woman, leaning in red bodice and blue petticoat, with lace-trimmed towel folded over her hair. Or again it would be a sunlit terrace lifted high on the hillside and crowded with carriages, full of beautifully dressed people, while below all Rome seemed spread out like a panorama, dim, mighty, majestic and bounded by the blue wavy line of the Campania and the Albin hills. Or perhaps it might be a wonderful double flight of steps with massive balustrades and pillars with urns, on which sat a crowd of figures and strange costumes and attitudes, who all looked as though they had stepped out of pictures, but who were in reality models waiting for artists to come by and engage them. No matter what it was, a bit of oddly tinted masonry with a tuft of brown and orange wallflowers hanging upon it, or a vegetable stall where on-dive and chicory and curly lettuces were arranged in reeds with tiny orange gourds and scarlet peppers for points of color. It was all Rome, and by virtue of that word, different from any other place, more suggestive, more interesting, ten times more mysterious than any other could possibly be. So Katie thought. This fact consoled her for everything and anything, for the fleas, the dirt, for the queer things they had to eat and still queer odors they were forced to smell. Nothing seemed of any particular consequence except the deep sense of enjoyment, and the newly discovered world of thought and sensation of which she had become suddenly conscious. The only drawback to her happiness, as the days went on, was that little Amy did not seem quite well or like herself. She had taken a cold on the journey from Naples, and though it did not seem serious, that, or something, made her look pale and thin. Her mother said she was growing fast, but the explanation did not quite account for the wistful look in the child's eyes and the tired feeling of which she continually complained. Mrs. Ash, with vague uneasiness, began to talk of cutting short their Roman stay and getting Amy off to the more bracing air of Florence. But meanwhile there was the carnival close at hand, which they must by no means lose, and the feeling that their opportunity might be a brief one made her and Katie all the more anxious to make the most of their time. So they filled the days full with sights to see and things to do, and came and went, sometimes taking Amy with them, but more often leaving her at the hotel under the care of a kind German chambermaid who spoke pretty good English and to whom Amy had taken a fancy. The marble things are so cold, and the old broken things make me so sorry, she explained, and I hate beggars because they're dirty and the stairs make my back ache, and I'd a great deal rather stay with Maria and go up on the roof if you don't mind, Mama. This roof, which Amy had chosen as a play place, covered the whole of the great hotel and had been turned into a kind of upper-air garden by the simple process of graveling it all over, placing trellises of ivy here and there, and setting tubs of oranges and oleanders and boxes of gay geraniums and stock ghillie flowers on balustrades. A tame fawn was tethered there. Amy adopted him as a playmate, and what with his company and that of the flowers the times when her mother and Katie were absent from her past not unhappily. Katie always repaired to the roof as soon as they came in from their long mornings and afternoons of sight-seeing. Years afterward she could remember with contrition how pathetically glad Amy was to see her. She would put her little head on Katie's breast and hold her tight for many minutes without saying a word. When she did speak it was always about the house and garden that she talked. She never asked any questions as to where Katie had been or what she had done. It seemed to tire her to think about it. I should be very lonely sometimes if it were not for my dear little fawn, she told Katie once. He's so sweet and I don't miss you and Mama very much while I have him to play with. I call him Florio. Don't you think that is a pretty name? I'd 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 to go to Florence came. Katie 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. Ash 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 streets 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 and tall hats and linen dusters, harlequins, clowns, devils, nuns, dominoes of every color, red, white, blue, black while above the balconies bloomed like a rose garden with pretty faces framed in lace veils or picturesque hats. Flowers were everywhere, wreathed along the house fronts tied to the horse's ear and ladies' hands and gentlemen's buttonholes, while vendors went up and down the street bearing great trays of violets and carnations and camellios for sale. The air was full of cries and laughter and the shrill calls of merchants advertising their wares, candy, fruit, birds, lanterns and confetti, the latter being merely lumps of lime, large or small, with a pea or a bean embedded in each lump to give it weight. Boxes full of this unpleasant confection were suspended in front of each balcony, with tin scoops to use in ladling it out and flinging it about. Everybody wore carried a wire mast for his protection against this white incessant shower, and before long the air became full of fine dust which hung above the corset like a mist, and filled the eyes and nose and clothes of all present with irritating particles. Pasquino's car was passing underneath, just as Katie and Mrs. Ash arrived, a gorgeous affair, hung with silken draperies and bearing as a symbol an enormous egg in which the carnival was supposed to be in the act of incubation. A huge wagon followed in its wake, on which a house some sixteen feet square whose sole occupant was a gentleman attended by five servants who kept him supplied with confetti, which he showered liberally on the heads of the crowd. Then came a car in the shape of a steamboat, with a smoke pipe and sails over which flew the Union Jack, and which was manned with a party wearing the dress of British Tars. The next wagon bore a company of jolly maskers equipped with many colored bladders which they banged and rattled as they went along. Following this was a troop of beautiful circus horses cream-colored with scarlet trappings or sorrel with blue, ridden by ladies and pale green velvet laced with silver, or blue velvet and gold. Another car bore a birdcage, which was an exact imitation of St. Peter's, within which perched a lonely parrot. This device evidently had political significance, for it was alternately hissed and applauded as it went along. The whole scene was like a brilliant, rapidly shifting dream, and Katie, as she stood with lips apart and eyes wide open with wonderment and pleasure, forgot whether she was in the body or not, forgot everything except what was passing before her gaze. She was roused by a stinging shower of lime dust, and Englishmen in the next balcony had taken courteous advantage of her preoccupation, and had flung a scootful of confetti in her undefended face. It was generally Anglo-Saxons of the less refined class, English or Americans who do these things at carnival time. The national love of rough joke comes to the surface encouraged by the license of the moment, and all the grace and prettiness of the festival vanish. Katie laughed and dusted herself off, as well as she could, and took refuge behind her mask, while a nimble American boy of the party changed places with her, and thenceforth made that particular Englishman his special target, plying such a lovely, lively and adroit shovel as to make Katie's assailant rue the hour when he evoked this national reprisal. His powdered head and rather clumsy efforts to retaliate excited shouts of laughter from the adjoining balconies. The young American, fresh from tennis and college athletics, darted about and dodged with an agility impossible to his heavily built foe, and each effective shot and parry on his side was greeted with little cries of applause, and the clapping of hands on the part of those who were watching the contest. Exactly opposite them was a balcony hung with white silk in which sat a lady who seemed to be of some distinction, for every now and then an officer in brilliant uniform or some official covered with orders and stars would be shown in by her servants, bow before her with the utmost deference, and after a little conversation retire, kissing her gloved hand as he went. The lady was a beautiful person with lustrous black eyes and dark hair over which a lace mantilla was fastened with diamond stars. She wore pale blue with white flowers, and altogether, as Katie afterwards wrote to Clover, reminded her exactly of one of those beautiful princesses whom they used to play about in their childhood and quarrel over because every one of them wanted to be the princess and nobody else. I wonder who she is, said Mrs. Ash in a low tone. She might be almost anybody from her looks. She keeps glancing across to us, Katie. Do you know? I think she's taken a fancy to you. Perhaps the lady had, for just then, she turned her head and said a word to one of her footmen, who immediately placed something in her hand. It was a little a shining bon-bon year. And rising she threw it straight at Katie, alas, it struck the edge of the balcony and fell into the street below, where it was picked up by a ragged little peasant girl in a red jacket, who raised a pair of astonished eyes to the heavens, as if sure that gift must have fallen straight from thence. Katie bent forward to watch its fate and went through a little pantomime of regret and despair for the benefit of the opposite lady, wholly laughed and taking another from her servant flung with better aim so that it fell exactly at Katie's feet. This was a gilded box in the shape of a mandolin, which sugar plums tucked cunningly away inside. Katie kissed both of her hands in acknowledgment for the pretty toy and tossed back a bunch of roses, which she happened to be wearing in her dress. After that it seemed the chief amusement of the fair unknown to throw bon-bons at Katie. Some went straight and some did not, but before the afternoon ended Katie had quite a lap full of confections and trifles, roses, sugared almonds, a satin casket, a silvered box in the shape of a horseshoe, a tiny cage with orange blossoms per birds on the purchase, a minute gondola with a maranglissé by way of a passenger, and prettiest of all a little ivory harp strung with enameled violets instead of wires. For all these favors she had nothing better to offer in return than a few long-tailed bon-bons with gay streamers of ribbon. These the lady opposite caught very cleverly, rarely missing one, and kissing her hand in thanks each time. Isn't she exquisite, demanded Katie, her eyes shining with excitement? Did you ever see anyone so lovely in your life? Polly dear, I never did. There now she is buying those birds to set them free, I do believe. It was indeed so, a vendor of larks had, by the aid of a long staff, thrust a cage full of wretched little prisoners up into the balcony, and Katie's lady, as Mrs. Ash called her, was paying for the whole. As they watched, she opened the cage door, and with the sweetest look on her face encouraged the birds to fly away. The poor little creatures cowered and hesitated, not knowing at first what used to make of their new liberty, but at last one, the boldest of the company, hopped to the door and with a glad exultant chirp flew straight upward. Then the others, taking courage from his example, followed, and all were lost of you in the twinkling of an eye. Oh, you angel, cried Katie, leaning over the edge of the balcony and kissing both hands impulsively. I never saw anyone so sweet as you are in my life. Polly dear, I think carnivals are the most perfectly bewitching things in the world. How glad I am that this lasts a week and that we can come every day. Won't Amy be delighted with these bonbons? I do hope my lady will be here tomorrow. How little she dreamed that she was never to enter that balcony again. How little can any of us see what lies before us till it comes so near that we cannot help seeing it or shut our eyes and turn away. The next morning, almost as soon as it was light, Mrs. Ash tapped at Katie's door. She was in her dressing gown, and her eyes looked large and frightened. Amy is ill, she cried. She has been hot and feverish all night, and she says that her head aches dreadfully. What shall I do, Katie? We ought to have a doctor at once, and I don't know the name of even any doctor here. Katie sat up in bed, and for one bewildered moment did not speak. Her brain felt in a whirl of confusion, but presently it cleared, and she saw what to do. I will write a note to Mrs. Sands, she said. Mrs. Sands was the wife of the American Minister, and one of the few acquaintances they had made since they came to Rome. You remember how nice she was the other day, and how we liked her. And she has lived here so long that of course she must know all about doctors. Don't you think that's the best thing to do? The very best, said Mrs. Ash, looking relieved. I wonder I did not think of it myself, but I'm so confused I can't think. Write the note at once, please, dear Katie. I will ring your bell for you, and then I must hurry back to Amy. Katie made haste with the note. The answer came promptly in half an hour, and by ten o'clock the physician recommended appeared. Dr. Hillary was a dark little Italian to all appearance, but his mother had been a Scotch woman, and he spoke English very well, a great comfort to poor Mrs. Ash, who knew not a word of Italian and not a great deal of French. He felt for Amy's pulse for a long time and tested her temperature, but he gave no positive opinion, only left a prescription, and said that he would call back later in the day and should then be able to judge more clearly what the attack was likely to prove. Katie argued ill from the reserve. There was no talk of going to the carnival that afternoon. No one had any heart for it. Instead, Katie spent the time in trying to recollect all she had ever heard about the care of sick people, what was to be done first and what next, and in searching the shops for a feather pillow, which luxury Amy was imperiously demanding. The pillows of Roman hotels are, as a general thing, stuffed with wool, and very hard. I won't have this horrid pillow any longer, poor Amy was screaming. It's got bricks in it. It hurts the back of my neck. Take it away, Mama, and give me a nice, soft American pillow. I won't have this a minute longer. Don't you hear me, Mama? Take it away. So while Mrs. Ash pacified Amy to the best of her ability, Katie hurried out in quest of the desired pillow. It proved almost an unattainable luxury. But at last, after a long search, she secured an air cushion, a down cushion about twelve inches square, and one old feather pillow which had come from some auction, and apparently lain for years in the corner of the shop. When this was encased in a fresh cover of canton flannel, it did very well, and stilled Amy's complaints a little. But all night she grew worse, and when Dr. Hiller came next day, he was forced to utter plainly, the dreaded words, Roman fever. Amy was in for an attack, a light one he hoped it might be, but they had better know the truth and make ready for it. Mrs. Ash was utterly overwhelmed by this verdict, and for the first bewildered moment did not know which way to turn. Katie happily kept a steadier head. She had the advantage of a little preparation of thought, and had decided beforehand what it would be necessary to do in case. Oh, that fateful in case. The doctor and she consulted together, and the result was that Katie sought out the padrona of the establishment, and without hinting at the nature of Amy's attack secured some rooms just vacated, which were at the end of a corridor and a little removed from the rooms of other people. There was a large room with corner window, a smaller one opening from it, and another still smaller close by, which would serve as a storeroom or might do for the use of a nurse. These rooms, without much consultation with Mrs. Ash, who seemed stunned and sat with her eyes fixed on Amy, just answering, certainly, dear, anything you say when applied to. Katie had arranged, according to her own ideas of comfort and hygienic necessity, as learned from Mrs. Nightingale's excellent little book on nursing. In the larger room she had the carpet curtains and nearly all the furniture taken away. The floor scrubbed with hot soap suds and the bell pulled out from the wall to allow a free circulation of air all around it. The smaller one she made as comfortable as possible for the use of Mrs. Ash, choosing the softest sofa and the best mattress that were obtainable, for she knew that her friend's strength was likely to be severely tried, if Amy's illness proved serious. When all was ready, Amy, well wrapped in her coverings, was carried down to the entry and laid in the fresh bed with soft pillows about her, and Katie, as she went to and fro conveying clothes and books and filling drawers, felt that they were perhaps making arrangements for a long, hard trial of faith and spirits. By the next day the necessity of a nurse became apparent and in the afternoon Katie started out in a little hired carriage in search of one. She had a list of names and went first to the English nurses, but finding them all engaged she ordered the coachman to drive to a convent where there was hope that a nursing sister might be procured. Their route lay across the corso, so utterly had the carnival with all its gay follies vanished from her mind, that she was for a moment astonished at finding herself entangled in a motley crowd, so dense that the coachman was obliged to rein in his horses and stand still for a time. There were the same masks and dominoes, the same picturesque peasant costumes which has struck her as so gay and pretty only three days before. The same jests and merry laughter filled the air, but somehow it all seemed out of tune. The sense of cold, lonely fear that had taken possession of her killed all capacity for merriment, the apprehension and solicitude of which her heart was full, made the gay chattering and squeaking of the crowd sound harsh and unfeeling. The bright colors affronted her dejection. She did not want to see them. She lay back in the carriage trying to be patient under the detention and half shut her eyes. A shower of limedust aroused her. It came from a party of burly figures in white cotton dominoes whose carriage had been stayed by the crowd close to her own. She signified by gestures that she had no confetti and no protection, that she was not playing. In fact, but her appeal made no difference. The masqueras kept on shoveling lime all over her hair and person and the carriage and never tired of the sport till on an opportune break in the procession enabled their vehicle to move on. Katie was shaking their largesse from her dress and parasol as well as she could when an odd gibbering sound close to her ear. And the laughter of the crowd attracted her attention to the back of the carriage. A masqueror tired as a scarlet devil had climbed into the hood and was now perched close behind her. She shook her head at him, but he only shook his in return and chattered and grimaced and bent over till his fury mask almost grazed her shoulder. There was no hope but in good humor as she speedily realized and recollecting that in her shopping bag one or two of the carnival bonbons still remained. She took these out and offered them in the hopes of propitiating him. The fiend bit one to ensure that it was made of sugar and not lime, while the crowd laughed more than ever. Then, seeming satisfied, he made Katie a little speech and rapid Italian of which she did not comprehend a word, kissed her hand, jumped down from the carriage and disappeared in the crowd to her great relief. Presently after the driver spied an opening of which he took advantage, they were across the corso now, the roar and rush of the carnival dying into silence as they drove rapidly on, and Katie, as she finished wiping away the last of the lime dust, wiped some tears from her cheeks as well. How hateful it all was, she said to herself, then she remembered a sentence read somewhere, how heavily rolled the wheels of other people's joys when your heart is sorrowful, and she realized it was true. The convent was propitious and promised to send a sister next morning, with the proviso that every second day she was to come back and sleep and rest. Katie was too thankful for any aid to make objections, and drove home with visions of saintly nuns with pure pale faces full of peace and resignation, such as she had heard of in books floating before her eyes. Sister Ambrosia, when she appeared the next day, did not exactly realize those imaginations. She was a plump little person with rosy cheeks a pair of demure black eyes and a very obstinate mouth and chin. It soon appeared that natural inclination combined with the rules of her convent made her theory of the nurse's duties a very limited one. If Miss Asht wished her to go down to the office with an order, she was told, we sisters care for the sick, we are not allowed to converse with the porters and the hotel people. If Katie suggested on the way home she should leave a prescription at the chemist, it was, we sisters are for nursing only, we do not visit shops. And when she was asked if she could make beef tea, she replied calmly but decisively, we sisters are not cooks. In fact, all that Sister Ambrosia seemed able or willing to do, beyond the bathing of Amy's face and brushing her hair, which she accomplished handily, was to sit by the bedside telling her rosary or plying a little ebony shuttle in the manufacture of a long strip of tatting. Even this amount of usefulness was interfered with by the fact that Amy, who by this time was in a semi-delirious condition, had taken an aversion to her at the first glance and was not willing to be left with her for a single moment. I won't stay alone with Sister Ambroidery, she would cry, if her mother and Katie went into the next room for a moment's rest or a private consultation. I hate Sister Ambroidery. Come back, Mama. Come back this moment. She's making faces at me and chattering just like an old parrot. And I don't understand a word she says. Take Sister Ambroidery away, Mama. I tell you, don't you hear me? Come back, I say. The little voice would be raised to a shrill scream and Mrs. Ash and Katie hurrying back would find Amy sitting up on her pillow with wet, scarlet flush cheeks and eyes bright with fever, ready to throw herself out of bed, while Calm is Mabel, whose curly head lay on the pillow beside her mistress, Sister Ambrosia, unaware of the intricacies of the English language, was placidly telling her beads and muttering prayers to herself. Some of these prayers I do not doubt related to Amy's recovery, if not to her conversion, and were well meant, but they were rather irritating under the circumstances. The first shock is over and the inevitable realized and accepted, those who tend a long illness are apt to fall into a routine of life, which helps to make the days seem short. The apparatus of nursing has got together. Every day the same things need to be done at the same hours and in the same way. Each little appliance is kept at hand. And sad and tired as the watchers may be, the very monotony and regularity of their proceedings give a certain stay for their thoughts to rest upon. But there was little of this monotony to help Mrs. Ash and Katie through Amy's illness. Small chance were there for regularity or exact system, for something unexpected was always turning up, and needful things were often lacking. The most ordinary comforts of the sick room, or what were considered so in America, were hard to come by, and much of Katie's time was spent in devising substitutes to take to places. Was ice needed? A pailful of dirty snow would be brought in, full of straws, sticks, and other refuse, which had apparently been scraped from the surface of the street after a frosty night. Not a particle of it could be put into milk or water. All that could be done was to make the pail serve the purpose of a refrigerator, and set bowls and tumblers in it to chill. Was a feeding cup wanted? It came of a cumbersome and antiquated pattern, which the infant Hercules may have enjoyed, but which the modern Amy abominated and rejected. Such a thing as a glass tube could not be found in all Rome. Bedrest were unknown. Katie searched in vain for the India rubber hot water bag. But the greatest trial of all was the beef tea. It was Amy's soul food in almost her only medicine, for Dr. Hillary believed in leaving nature pretty much to herself in cases of fever. The kitchen of the hotel sent up under that name a mixture of grease and hot water, which could not be given to Amy at all. In vain Katie remonstrated and explained the process. In vain did she go to the kitchen herself to translate a carefully written recipe to the cook, and to slip a shining five frank piece in his hand, which was hoped would quicken his energies and soften his heart. In vain did she order private supplies of the best of beef from a separate market. The cook stole the beef and ignored the recipe, and day after day the same bottle full of greasy liquid came upstairs. At last driven to desperation, Katie procured a couple of stout bottles, and every morning slowly and carefully cut up two pounds of meat into small pieces, sealed the bottle with her own seal ring, and sent it down to be boiled for a specified time. This answered better, for the thieving cook dared not tamper with her seal, but it was a long and toilsome process, and consumed more time than she well knew how to spare. For there were continual errands to be done, which no one could attend to but herself, and the interminable flights of stairs taxed her strength painfully, and seemed to grow longer and harder. Every day. At last a good Samaritan turned up in the shape of an American lady, with a house of her own, who, hearing of their plight from Mrs. Sands, undertook to sand each day a supply of strong, perfectly made beef tea from her own kitchen, for Amy's use. It was an inexpressible relief, and the lightning of this one particular care made all the rest seem easier of endurance. Another great relief came, when after some delay, Dr. Hillary succeeded in getting an English nurse to take the places of the unsatisfactory Sister Ambrosia and her substitute Sister Agatha, whom Amy, in her half-comprehending condition, persisted in calling Sister Nutmeg greater. Mrs. Swift was a tall, wiry, angular person, who seemed made of equal parts of iron and quail bone. She was never tired. She could lift anybody, do anything, and for sleep. She seemed to have a sort of antipathy, preferring to sit in an easy chair and drop off into little doses, whenever it was convenient, to go in regularly to bed for a night's rest. Amy took to her from the first, and the new nurse managed her beautifully. No one else could soothe her half so well during the delirious period, when the little shrill voice seemed never to be still, and went on all day and all night, and alternate raving or screaming, or, what was saddest of all to hear, low pitiful moans. There was no shedding in these sounds. People moved out of the rooms below and on either side, because they could get no sleep, and till the arrival of Nurse Swift, there was no rest for poor Mrs. Ash, who could not keep away from her darling for a moment while that mournful wailing sounded in her ears. Somehow the long, dry English woman seemed to have a mesmeric effect on Amy, who was never quite so violent after she arrived. Katie was more thankful for this than can be well told. For her great underlying dread, dread she dared not whisper plainly even to herself, was that Polly, dear, might break down before Amy was better. And then what should they do? She took every care that was possible of her friend. She made her eat. She made her lie down. She forced daily doses of quinine, and poured wine down her throat, and saved her every possible step. But no one, however affectionate and willing, could do much to lift the crushing burden of care, which was changing Mrs. Ash's rosy fairness to one pallor, and laying such dark shadows under the pretty gray eyes. She had taken small thought of look since Amy's illness, all the little touches which had made her toilet becoming. All the crimps and fluffs had disappeared, yet somehow never had she seemed to Katie have so lovely as now in the plain black gown, which she wore all day long, with her hair tucked into a knot behind her ears. Her real beauty of feature and outline seemed only enhanced by the rigid plainness of her attire, and the charm of true expression grew in her face. Never had Katie admired and loved her friends so well, as during those days of fatigue and wearing suspense, we realize so strongly the worth of her sweetness of temper, her unselfishness and power of devoting herself to other people. Polly bears it wonderfully, she wrote her father. She was all broken down for the first day or two, but now her courage and patience are surprising. When I think how precious Amy is to her, and how lonely her life would be if she were to die, I can hardly keep the tears out of my eyes. But Polly does not cry. She is quiet and brave and almost cheerful all the time, keeping herself busy with what needs to be done. She never complains, and she looks, oh, so pretty! I think I never knew how much she had in her before. All this time no word had come from Lieutenant Worthington. His sister had written him, as soon as Amy was taken ill, and had twice telegraphed the sense, but no answer had been received, and the strange silence added to the sense of lonely isolation, and distance from home and help, which those who encounter illness in a foreign land have to bear. So first one week and then another wore themselves away somehow. The fever did not break on the fourteenth day, as had been hoped. I must run for another period, the doctor said. But its force was lessened, and he considered that a favorable sign. Amy was quieter now, and did not rave so constantly, but she was very weak. All her pretty hair had been shorn away, which made her little face look tiny and sharp. Mabel's golden wig was sacrificed at the same time. Amy had insisted upon it, and they dared not cross her. She has got a fever, too. And it's a great deal better than mine is, she protested. Her cheeks are as hot as fire. She ought to have ice on her head. And how can she when her bang is so thick? Cut it all off, every bit, and then I'll let you cut mine. You had better give the child her way, said Dr. Hillary. She's in no state to be fretted with trifles. Trifles, the doctor meant, and in the end it will be well, for the fever infection might harbor in that doll's head as well as elsewhere, and I should have to disinfect it, which would be bad for the skin of her. She isn't a doll, cried Amy, overhearing him. She's my child, and you shant call her names. She hugged Mabel, tightened her arms, and glared at Dr. Hillary defiantly. So Katie, with pitiful fingers, slashed away at Mabel's blonde wig, till her head was as bare as a billiard ball. And Amy, quite content, patted her child while her own locks were being cut and murmured. Perhaps your hair will all come out in little round curls, darling, as Johnny Cars did. Then she fell into one of the quietest sleeps she had yet had. It was the day after this that Katie, coming in from a round of errands, found Mrs. Ash standing erect and pale, with a frightened look in her eyes, and her back against Amy's door as if defending it from somebody. Confronting her was Madame Frullini, the padrona of the hotel. Madame's cheeks were red, and her eyes bright and fierce. She was evidently in a rage about something, and was pouring out a torrent of excited Italian, with now and then a French or English word slipped in by way of punctuation, and all so rapidly that only a trained ear could have followed or grasped her meaning. What is the matter? asked Katie in amazement. Oh, Katie, I'm so glad you have come, cried poor Mrs. Ash. I can hardly understand a word that this horrible woman says, but I think she wants to turn us out of the hotel, and that we shall take Amy to some other place. Could be the death of her. I know it would. I never, never will go, unless the doctor says it is safe. I oughtn't do. I couldn't. She can't make me. Can she, Katie? Madame, said Katie, and there was a flash in her eyes before which the landlady rather shrank. What is all this? Why do you come to trouble, madame, while her child is so ill? Then came another torrent of explanation, which didn't explain. But Katie gathered enough of the meaning to make out that Mrs. Ash was quite correct in her guess. And that matter from Leni was requesting, nay, insisting, that they should remove Amy from the hotel at once. There were plenty of apartments to be had now that the carnival was over, she said. Her own cousin had rooms close by. It could easily be arranged, and people were going away from the Delmondo every day because there was fever in the house. Such a thing could not be. It should not be. The landlady's voice rose to a shriek. The child must go. You are a cruel woman, said Katie indignantly, when she had grasped the meaning of the outburst. It is wicked. It is cowardly to come thus and attack a poor lady under your roof who has so much more ready to bear. It is her only child who is lying in there. Her only one. Do you understand, madame? And she is a widow. What you ask might kill the child. I shall not permit you or any of your people to enter that door till the doctor comes, and then I shall tell him how you have behaved, and we shall see what he will say. As she spoke, she turned the key of Amy's door, took it out, and put it in her pocket, then faced the padrona steadily, looking her straight in the eyes. Madame Moselle, stormed the landlady. I give you my word. Four people have left this house already because of the noises made by Little Miss. More will go. I shall lose my winter's profit. All of it. All. It will be said there is fever at the Delmondo. No one will hear after come to me. There are lodgings plenty comfortable. Oh, so comfortable. I will not have my season ruined by a sickness. No, I will not. Madame Fellini's voice was again rising to a screen. Be silent, said Katie Stirling. You will frighten the child. I am sorry that you should lose any customers, madame, but the fever is here, and we are here, and here we must stay till it is safe to go. The child shall not be moved till the doctor gives permission. Money is not the only thing in the world. Mrs. Ash will pay anything that is fair to make up your losses to you, but you must leave this room now and not return till Dr. Hillary is here. Where Katie found friends for all these long coherent speeches, she could never afterward imagine. She tried to explain it by saying that excitement inspired her for the moment, but that as soon as the moment was over, the inspiration died away, and left her as speechless and confused as ever. Clover said it made her think of the miracle of Balaam, and Katie merely rejoined that it might be so, and that no donkey in any age of the world could possibly have been more grateful than she was for the sudden gift of speech. But it is not the money. It is my prestige, declared the landlady. Thank heaven! Here is the doctor now, cried Mrs. Ash. The doctor had, in fact, been standing in the doorway for several moments before they noticed him, and had overheard part of the colloquy with Madame Frullini. With him was someone else, at the sight of whom Mrs. Ash gave a great sob of relief. It was her brother at last. When Italian meets Italian, then comes the tug of explicative. It did not seem to take one second for Dr. Hillary to whirl the padrona out into the entry where they could be heard going at each other like two furious cats. Hiss, roll, sputter, reclamation, obdication. In five minutes Madame Frullini was, metaphorically speaking, on her knees, and the doctor standing over her withdrawn sword, making her take back every word she'd said, and every threat she had uttered. Prestige of thy miserable hotel, he thundered. Where will that be when I go and tell the English and Americans, all of whom I know, everyone, how thou has served a countrywoman of theirs in thy house? Does thou think thy prestige will help thee much when Dr. Hillary has fixed a black mark on thy door? I tell thee, no. Not a stranger shout thou have next year to eat so much as a plate of macaroni under thy base roof. I will advertise thy behavior in all the foreign papers, in Figaro and Galignini, in the Swiss Times, and the English one, which is read by all the nobility, and the Geraldo of New York, which all Americans peruse. Oh, doctor, pardon me, I regret what I said. I am afflicted. I will post thee in the railroad stations, continue the doctor implacably. I will bid my patience to write letters to all the friends, warning them against thy flea ridden del mondo. I will apprise the steamboat companies as Genoa and Naples. Thou shalt see what come of it, truly thou shalt see. Having thus reduced Madame Berlini to powder, the doctor now condescended to take breath and to listen to her appeals for mercy. And presently he brought her in with her mouth full of protestations and apologies, and assurances that the ladies had mistaken her meaning. She had only spoken for the good of all. Nothing was further from her attention than that they should be disturbed or offended in any way, and she and all her household were at the service of the sick little angel of God, after which the doctor dismissed her with an air of contemptuous tolerance and laid his hand on the door of Amy's room. Behold! It was locked! Oh, I forgot! cried Katie, laughing, and she pulled a key out of her pocket. You are a heroine, Mademoiselle, said Dr. Hillary. I watched you as you faced that Tigris, and your eyes were like a swordsman as he regarded his enemies a rapier. Oh, she was so brave and such a help! said Mrs. Ash, kissing her impulsively. You can't think how she has stood by me all through, Ned, or what a comfort she has been. Yes, I can, said Ned Worthington, with a warm, grateful look at Katie. I can believe anything good of Miss Carr. But where have you been all this time? said Katie, who felt this flood of compliment to be embarrassing. We have so wondered at not hearing from you. I have been off on a ten days leave to Corsica for moof long shooting, replied Mr. Worthington. I only got Polly's telegrams and letters the day before yesterday, and I came as soon as I could get my leave extended. It was a most unlucky absence. I shall always regret it. Oh, it is all right now that you've come. His sister said leaning her head on his arm with a look of relief and rest which was good to see. Everything will go better now, I am sure. Katie Carr has behaved like a perfect angel, she told her brother when they were alone. She is a trump of a girl. I came in time for part of that scene with the landlady, and upon my word she was glorious. I didn't suppose she could look so handsome. Have the pages left, niece yet? Asked his sister rather irrelevantly. No, at least they were there on Thursday. But I think that they were to start to-day. Mr. Worthington answered carelessly, but his face darkened as he spoke. There had been a little scene in niece which he could not forget. He was sitting in the English garden with Lily and her mother when his sister's telegrams were brought to him, and he had read them aloud partly as an explanation for the immediate departure which they made necessary and which broke up an excursion just arranged with the ladies for the afternoon. It is not pleasant to have plans interfered with, and as neither Mrs. Page nor her daughter cared personally for little Amy, it is not strange that disappointment at the interruption of their pleasure should have been the first impulse with them. Still this did not excuse Lily's unstudied exclamation of, oh, bother! And though she speedily repented it as an indiscretion, and was properly sympathetic, and hoped the poor little thing would soon be better, Amy's uncle could not forget the jarring impression. It completed a process of disenchantment which had long been going on, and as hearts were sometimes caught at the rebound, Mrs. Ash was not so far astray when she built certain little dim sisterly hopes on his evident admiration for Katie's courage, and this sudden awakening to a sense of her good looks. But no space was left for sentiment or matchmaking while still Amy's fate hung in the balance, and all three of them found plenty to do during the next fortnight. The fever did not turn on the twenty-first day, and another weary week of suspense set in. Each day bringing a decrease of the dangerous symptoms, but each day as well marking a lessening in the childish strength which had been so long and severely tested. Amy was quite conscious now, and lay quietly, sleeping a great deal and speaking seldom. There was not much to do but to wait and hope, but the flame of hope burned low at times as the little life flickered in its socket, and seemed likely to go out like a wind-blown torch. Now and then, Lieutenant Worthington would persuade his sister to go with him for a few minutes' drive or walk in the fresh air from which she had so long been debarred, and once or twice he prevailed on Katie to do the same, but neither of them could bear to be away long from Amy's bedside. Intimacy grows fast when people are thus united by a common anxiety, sharing the same hopes and fears day after day, speaking and thinking of the same thing. The gay young officer at Nice, who had counted so little in Katie's world, seemed to have disappeared, and the gentle, considerate, tender-hearted fellow who now filled this place was quite a different person in her eyes. Katie began to count on Ned Worthington as a friend who could be trusted for help and sympathy and comprehension, and appealed to and relied upon in all emergencies. She was quite at ease with him now and asked him to do this and that, to come and help her or to absent himself as freely as if he had been Dory or Phil. He on his part found this easy intimacy charming, and the reaction of his temporary glamour for the pretty Lily, Katie's very difference from her, was an added attraction. This difference consisted, as much as anything else, in the fact that she was so truly an earnest in what she said and did. Had Lily been in Katie's place, she would probably have been helpful to Mrs. Ash and kind to Amy so far as in her lay. But the thought of self would have tinctured all that she did and said, and the need of keeping to what was tasteful and becoming, would have influenced her in every emergency, and never have been absent from her mind. Katie, on the contrary, absorbed in the needs of the moment, gave little heed to how she looked or what anyone was thinking about her. Her habit of neatness made her take time for the one thorough daily dressing, the brushing of hair and freshening of clothes which were customary with her. But this tax paid to personal comfort she gave little further heed to appearances. She wore an old grey gown, day in and day out, which Lily would not have put on for half an hour without a large bride, so unbecoming was it. But somehow Lieutenant Worthington grew to like the grey gown as part of Katie herself, and if by chance he brought a rose in to cheer the dim stillness of the sick room, and she tucked it into her buttonhole, immediately it was as though she were decked for conquest. Pretty dresses are very pretty on pretty people. They certainly play an important part in this queer little world of ours. But depend upon it, dear girls, no woman ever has established so distinct and clear a claim on the regard of her lover as when he has ceased to notice or analyze what she wears. And she just accepts it, unquestingly, whatever it is, as a bit of the dear human life which is grown or is growing to be the best and most delightful thing in the world to him. The grey gown played its part during the long anxious night when they all sat watching breathlessly to see which way the tide would turn with dear little Amy. The doctor came at midnight and went away to come again at dawn. Mrs. Swift sat grim and watchful beside the pillow of her charge, rising now and in to fill pulse and skin, or to put a spoonful of something between Amy's lips. The doors and windows stood open to admit the air. In the outer room all was hushed. A dim Roman lamp, fed with olive oil, burned in one corner behind a screen. Mrs. Ash lay on the sofa with her eyes closed, bearing the strain of suspense and absolute silence. Her brother sat beside her, holding in his one of the hot hands whose nervous twitch is alone, told of the surging of hope and fear within. Katie was resting in a big chair nearby. Her wistful eyes fixed on Amy's little figure seen in the dim distance. Her ears alert for every sound from the sick room. So they watched and waited. Now and then Ned Worthington or Katie would rise softly, still on tiptoe to the bedside, and come back to whisper to Mrs. Ash that Amy had stirred, or that she seemed to be asleep. It was one of the nights which do not come often in a lifetime and which people never forget. The darkness seemed full of meaning, the hush of sound. God is beyond, holding the sunrise in his right hand, holding the sun of our earthly hopes as well. Will it dawn in sorrow or in joy? We dare not ask. We can only wait. A faint stir of wind and a little broadening of the light roused Katie from a trance of half-understood thoughts. She crapped once more into Amy's room. Mrs. Swift laid a warning finger on her lips. Amy was sleeping, she said with a gesture. Katie whispered the news to the still figure on the sofa. Then she went noiselessly out of the room. The great hotel was fast asleep. Not a sound stirred the profound silence of the dark halls. A longing for fresh air led her to the roof. There was the dawn just tinging the east. The sky even thus early wore the deep, mysterious blue of Italy. A fresh Tramontana was blowing, and made Katie glad to draw her shawl about her. Far away in the distance was the Albin Hills above the dim Camagnon, with more lofty Sabines beyond, and syruped clear-cut against the sky like a wave frozen in the moment of breaking. Below lay the ancient city with its strange mingling of the old and the new, of past things embedded in the present, or is it the present thinly availing the rich and mighty past? Who shall say? Faint rumblings of wheels, and here and there a curl of smoke showed that Rome was waking up. The lighting sensibly grew upon the darkness. A pink flesh lit up the horizon. Florian stirred, and his lair stretched his dappled limbs, and as the first sun ray glinted on the roof, raised himself, crossed the gravel tiles with soundless feet, and ran his soft nose into Katie's hand. She fondled him for Amy's sake, as she stood bent over the flower boxes, inhaling the scent of the mignette and the ghillie flowers, with her eyes fixed on the distance. But her heart was at home with the sleepers there, and a rush of strong desire stirred her. Would this dreary time come to an end presently, and should they be set at liberty to go their ways, with no heavy sorrow to press them down, to be carefree and happy again in their own land? A footstep startled her. Ned Worthington was coming over the roof, on tiptoe, as if fearful of disturbing somebody. His face looked resolute and excited. I wanted to tell you, he said in a hushed voice, that the doctor is here, and he says Amy has no fever, and with care may be considered out of danger. Thank God! cried Katie, bursting into tears. The long fatigue, the fears kept in check so resolutely. The sleepless night just passed. Had their revenge now. She cried and cried as she could never stop, but with all the time such joy and gratitude in her heart. She was conscious that Ned had his arm around her and was holding both her hands tight. They were so one in the emotion of the moment that it did not seem strange. How sweet the sun looks, she said presently, releasing herself with a happy smile flashing through her tears. It hasn't seemed really bright for ever so long. How silly I was to cry. Where is dear Polly? I must go down to her at once. Oh, what did she say? End of Chapter 10, Recording by Lorbeth Davis, Texas, USA Chapter 11, Part 1 of What Katie Did Next. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mario Pineda, What Katie Did Next, by Susan Kulich, Chapter 11, Part 1. Next, Lute. Worthy Townsleep had nearly expired. He must rejoin his ship, but he waited till the last possible moment in order to help his sister through the move to Albano, where it had been decided that Amy should go for a few days of hill air before undertaking the longer journey to Florence. It was a perfect morning and light march, when the pale little embellished was carrying her uncle's strong arms and placing the carriage, which was to take them to the old town on the mountain slopes, which I had seen shining from far away for so many weeks past. A spring had come in her favorite shape to Italy. The Campania had lost its brown and tawny hues and taken on a tinge of fresher color. The olive orchards were budding thickly. Almond bows extended the dazzling shapes across the blue sky. Arums and acanthus and ivy filled every hollow, roses knotted from over every gate, while a carpet of violets and cyclamen and prim roses stretched over the fields and fried to the every wandering wind with fragrance. When once the Campania, with its long line of aqueducts, arches and hoary thumps was left behind and the carriage slowly began to mount the gradual rises of the hill, Amy revived. With every breath of the fresher air, her eyes seemed to brighten and her voice to grow stronger. She held Mabel up to look at the view and the sound of her love, faint and feeble as it was, was like music to her mother's ears. Amy wore a droll little sick line cup on her head over which a downing growth of pale brown fuzz was gradually thickening. Already it showed the tendency to form into tiny rings, which to Amy, who had always hankered for curls, was an extreme satisfaction. As strange to say, the same thing exactly had happened to Mabel. Her hair had grown out into soft little round curls also. Uncle Ned and Katie had ransacked rum for this baby wig, which filled and realized all Amy's hopes for her child. On the same excursion, they had bought the materials for the pretty spring suit which Mabel wore for it had been deemed necessary to sacrifice most of her wardrobe as a concession to possible fevered germs. Amy admired the pearl-colored dress and hat, the French jagged and a little lace trim parcel so much that she was quite consoled for the lows of the blue velvet costume and ermine muff, which had been the pride of her heart ever since the left parties and whose destruction they had scarcely dared to confess to her. So up, up, up, they climbed till the gate where all the old town was passed and the carriage stopped before a quaint building once the residence of the Bishop of Albania, but now known as the Hotel de la Post. Here they alighted and were shown up a wide and lofty staircase to the rooms, which were on the sunny side of the house and looked across a walled garden where roses and lemon trees grew beside the old fountains guarded by sculpture lions on haythent divinities with broken noses and a scanned supply of fingers and toes to the Campania, purple with a distance and stretching miles and miles away to a room set on her seven heels, lifting high the dome of St. Peter's into the illuminated air. Nurse Swift said that Amy must go to bed at once and have a long rest, but Amy nearly wept at the proposal and declared that she was not a bit tired and couldn't sleep if she went to bed ever so much. The change of air had done her good already and she looked more like herself than for many weeks past. They compromised her dispute on the sofa where Amy well wrapped up was late and where in spite of her protestations she presently fell asleep, leaving the orders free to examine and arrange their new quarters. Such enormous rooms as there were. It was quite a journey to go from one side of them to another. The floors were of stone with squares of carpet laid down over them which looked absurdly small for the great spaces that were supposed to cover. The beds and tables were of the usual size, but they seemed almost like dull furniture because the chambers were so big. A quaint old paper with an enormous pattern of banyan trees and pagodas covered the walls and every now and then betrayed by an oblong of regular cracks to the existence of a hidden door, paper to look exactly like the rest of the wall. These mysterious doors made Cathy nervous and she never rested till she had opened every one of them and explored the places that led to. One gave access to a queer little bathroom, another led through an hour of door passage to a sort of balcony or loggia overhanging the garden. A third ended in the dusty closet with an artful chink in it from which you could peep into what had been the bishop's throwing room, but which was now turned into the dining room of the hotel. It seemed made for the purposes of a spiral and Cathy had visions of a long line of rubber and prolates with her ears glued to the chink, overhearing what was being said about them in the apartment beyond. The most surprising of all she did not discover till she was going to bed on the second night after the arrival when she thought she knew all about the mysterious doors and what they led to. A little unexplained draught of wind made her candle flicker and betrayed the existence of a still another door so currently hidden wall pattern that she had failed to notice it. She had quite a creepy feeling as she drew her dressing gown about her, took a light and entered an hour passage into which it opened. It was not a long passage and ended presently in a tire oratory. There was a little marble altar with a gneeling step and candlesticks and a great crucifix above. And so walks, candles still remain in the candlesticks and bunches of dusty paper flowers filled the bases which stood on either side of them. A faded silk caution lay on the step. Doveless the bishop had often knelt there. Cathy felt as if she were the first person to enter the place since she went away. Her common sense told her that in a hotel bedroom constantly occupied by strangers for years past someone must have discovered the door and found a little oratory before her. But common sense is sometimes less satisfactory than romance. Cathy liked the thing that she was the first and to make believe that no one else knew about it. So she did so and invented legends about the place which Amy considered better than any fairy story. Before he left them Lieutenant Warrington had a talk with his sister in the garden. She rather forced this talk upon him for various things were lying on her heart about which she longed for explanation. But he jilted so easily to her wiles that it was evident he was not averse to the idea. Come Polly, don't beat about the bush any longer. He said at last amused and a little irritated at her half hints and little feminine fineness. I know what you want to ask and as there is no use making a secret of it I will take my turn in asking. Have I had a chance, do you think? Any chance? About Cathy, do you mean? Oh, Ned, you make me so happy. Yes, about her of course. I don't see why you should say of course remark his sister with the perversity of her sex. When it's only five or six weeks ago that I was lying awake at night for fur you were being gobbled up by that little page. There was little risk of it. Reply her brother seriously. She is awfully pretty and she dances beautifully and the other fellows were all wild about her and well you know yourself how such things go. I can't see now what it was that I fancied so much about her. I don't suppose I could have told exactly at the time but I can tell without this modest trouble what it is in the order. In Cathy? I should think so. Cry Mr. Ash emphatically. The two are no more to be compared and that, well, Braden is still above. You can't live on one and you can't live on the order. Come now Miss Page, she isn't so bad as that. She is a nice girl enough and a pretty girl to. Pretter than Cathy. I'm not so far gone that I can't see that but we won't talk about her. She's not in the present question at all. Very likely she'd have had nothing to say to me in any case. I was only one out of the dozen and she never gave me a reason to suppose that she cared more for me than the rest. Let us talk about this friend of yours. Have I any chance at all? Do you think, Polly? Ned, you are a dearest boy. I would rather have Cathy for a sister than anyone else I know. She is so nice all true. So true and sweet and satisfactory. She is all that and more. She is a woman to tie two for life, to be perfectly sure of always. She would make a splendid wife for any man. I am not to have good enough for her. But the question is and you have an answer to that, Jet Polly. What's my chance? I don't know, said his sister slowly. Then I must ask herself. And I shall do so today. I don't know, repeated Mr. Ash. She is a woman, therefore, to be one. And I don't think there is anyone ahead of you. That is the best help I have to offer, Ned. Cathy never talks of such things and though she is so frank, I can't guess whether or not she ever thinks about him. She likes you, however, I'm sure of that. But Ned, it will not be wise to say anything to her yet. Not say anything? What not? No, recollect that it is only a little while since she looked upon you as the admirer of another girl. And a girl she doesn't like very much, though they are cousins. You most give her time to get over that impression. Wait a while. That's my advice, Ned. I'll wait any time if only she will say yes in the end, but it's hard to go away without a word of hope. And it's more like a man to speak out, it seems to me. It's too soon, persistent his sister. You don't want her to think you a fickle fellow, falling in love with a fresh girl every time you go into port and falling out again with the ship sales. Sailors have a bad reputation for that sort of thing. No woman cares to win a man like that. Great Scott, I should think not. Do you mean to say that is the way my conduct appears to her, Polly? No, I don't mean just that. But wait, there, Ned. I am sure it is better. Forty-five at this sage console, Lieutenant Worthington's went away next morning without saying anything to Caddy and words, though perhaps eyes and tones might have been less discreet. He made them promise that someone should send a letter every day about Amy, and that Mr. Ash frequently devolved the writing of this bulletin soap on Caddy, and the replies came in the shape of long letters she found herself conducting a pretty regular correspondence with a quiet intendent. Ned Worthington wrote particularly nice letters. He had the knack, more often found in women, that men have given a picture of with a few graphic touches and indicated what was droll or what was characteristic with a single happy phrase. His letters grew to be one of Caddy's pleasures, and sometimes, as Mr. Ash watched the color depending on her cheeks what she read, her heart would bound hopfully within her. But she was a wise woman in her way, and she wanted Caddy for his sister very much, so she never said a word or looked a look to startle or surprise her, but left the thing to work itself out, which is the best curse always in love at first. Little Amy's improvement at Albano was something remarkable. Mr. Swift watched over her like a lynx. Her vigilance never relaxed. Amy was made to eat and sleep and walk and rest with the regularity of a machine, and this exact system combined with the od air worked like a charm. The little one gained hour by hour. They could absolutely see her growing fat, her mother declared. Fiebers, when they did not kill, operate sometimes as a spring bonfires do in gardens. Burning up, Older refused and living this all free for the growth of favorite things, and Amy promised in time to be only the better and the stronger for her hard experience. She had gained so much before the time came to start for Florence that they scarcely dreaded the journey, but it proved worse than their expectations. They had not been able to secure a carriage to themselves, and were obliged to share their compartment with two English ladies and three Roman Catholic priests. One old, the others young. The older priest seemed to be a person of some consequence, for quite a number of people came to see him off and knelt for his blessing debaugdly as the train moved away. The younger one's cate guest to be seminary students under his torch. The chief amusement through the long dusty journey was in watching the terrible time that one of these young men was having with his own hut. It was a large three-corner black affair with sharp angles and excessively stiff, and a perpetual struggle seemed to be going on between it and its owner, who was evidently unhappy when he was on his head and is still more unhappy when it was anywhere else. If he perched on his knees, it was sure to slide away from him and fall with the thump on the floor, whereupon he would pick it up, blush inferiously, as he did so. Then he would lay it on the seat when the train stopped at the station and jumped out with an air of relief, but he invariably forgot and sat down upon it when he returned, and sprang up with a look of horror at the loud crackle it made, after which he would tug it into the baggage rack overhead from which it would presently descend, generally into the lap of one of the state English ladies, who would hand it back to him with an air of deep offense remarking to her companion. I never knew anything like it, fancy. That makes four times that a hut has fallen on me. The young man is a fidget. He is the most fidgety creature I've ever saw in my life. The young seminary hut did not understand a word she said, but the tone needed no interpreter, and set him to blushing more painfully than ever. Altogether, the hut was never off his mind for a moment. Catty could see that he was thinking about it, even when he was stumbling his bravery and making belief to read. At last, the train, steaming down the valley of the Arna, revealed fair Florence sitting among olive clad hills, with Gioro's beautiful bell tower, and the great many-colored, soft-hewed cathedral, and the square tower of the old palace, and the quaint bridges over the river, looking exactly as they do in the photographs. And Catty would have felt delighted in spite of dust and fatigue, had not Amy looked so worn out and exhausted. They were seriously troubled about her, and for a moment could think of nothing else. Happily, the fatigue did not permanent harm, and, a day or two of rest, made her all right again. By good fortune, a nice uplittle apartment in the modern quarter of the city had been vacated by its winter occupants the very day of arrival, and Mrs. Ash secured it for a month with all its conveniences and advantages including a maid named Maria, who had been servant to the just deported tenants. Maria was a very tall woman, at least six feet two, and had a splendid control to boys, which she occasionally exercised while busy over her pots and pans. It was so remarkable to hear these grand arias and recidatives proceeding from a kitchen some eighth-first square that Catty was at great pains to satisfy her curiosity about it. By eighth of the dictionary, and much persistent questioning, she made out that Maria and her youth had received a partial training for the opera, but in the end it was decided that she was too big and heavy for a stage, and the poor giantess, as Amy named her, had been forced to abandon her career, and gradually had sunk to the position of a maid of all work. Catty suspected that the heaviness of mind as well as a body must have stood in her way. For Maria, though a good nature giantess, was by no means quick of intelligence. I do think that the manner in which people over here can make commas for themselves at five minutes is notice. It's a perfectly delightful cry Catty, at the end of the first day's housekeeping. I wish we could do the same in America. How cozy it looks here already. It was indeed cozy. The new domain consisted of a parlor and a corner, furnished in bright yellow brocade, with windows to south and west, a nice little dining room, three bedrooms, with dimity curtain beds, a square entrance hall, lighted at night by a tall slender brass lamp, whose double wicks were fed with olive oil, and the aforesaid tiny kitchen, behind which was a sleeping cubby, quite too small to be a good fit for the giantess. The rooms were full of conveniences, easy chairs, sofas, plenty of burrows and dressing tables, and corner fireplaces like Franklin stubs, in which all the little fires burned in cool days, made of pine cones, cakes of pressed sodos, exactly like Boston brown bread cut into slices, and a few sticks of wood thriftly adjusted for a few weeks worth of sweating gold in Florence. Catty's was the smallest of the bedrooms, but she liked it best of all for the reason that it's one big window, open on an iron balcony, over which grew a banksia rose vine, with the stem as thick as her wrist. It was covered just now with masses of tiny white blossoms, whose fragrance was inexpressibly delicious, and made every breath drawn into the neighborhood of the light. The sound is trimmed in on all sides of the little apartment, which filled a narrowly angle at the union of three streets, and from one window and another, glimpses could be cut of the distant heights about the city. San Minato in one direction, Belos Guardo in another, and for the third, the long olive hung ascent of Fizol, crowned by its gray cathedral towers. It was astonishing how easily everything fell into train about the little establishment. Every morning at six, the English baker left two small sweet brown lubs, and a dozen rolls at the door, then followed the dairymen with a supply of tiny leaf shaped past of freshly churned butter, a big flask of milk, and two small bottles of thick cream, with a twist of vine leaf in each by way of a cork. Next came a contadino with a flask of red, gianty wine, a film of oil floating on top to keep it sweet. People in Florence must drink wine, whether they like it or not, because the lime in pregnant water is unsafe for use without some admixture. Dinner came from a trattoria in a tin box, with a pan of coals inside to keep it warm, which box was carried on a man's head. It was furnished at a fixed price per day, a soup, two dishes of meat, two vegetables, and a sweet dish, and the supply was so generous as always to leave something toward the next day's luncheon. Salad, fruit, and fresh eggs Maria bought for them in the all market. From the confectioners came loaves of panesanto, a sort of light cake made with aro-root instead of flour, and sometimes by way of treat, a square of pan for the daziena, compounded of honey, almonds, and chocolate, a mixture of pernicious as it is delicious, and which might take a medal anywhere for the sheer production of nightmares. Amy soon learned to know the shops from which this delicacy came. She had her favorites too, among these trolley merchants who sold oranges and those little sweet native figs, dried in the sun with a sugar, which are among the specialties of Florence. They, in return, learned to know her, and to watch for the appearance of her little capped head and mables-blong wig at the window, lingering about till she came, and advertising their wares with musical modulations, so appealing that Amy was always running to Caddy, who acted as housekeeper, to beg her to please buy this or that, because it is my old man and he wants me too so much. But chicken, we have plenty of figs for today. No matter, get some more, please do. I'll eat them all, really, I will, and Amy was as good as her word. Her convalescent appetite was something prodigious. There was another branch of shopping in which they all took equal delight. The beauty and the cheapness of the Florence flowers are a continual surprise to a stranger. Every morning, after breakfast, an old man came creaking up the two long flights of stairs, which led to Mr. Asher's apartment, tapped at the door, and as soon as it opened, inserted a shabby elbow and a large flat basket full of flowers. Such flowers! Great masses of scarlet and cream-colored tulips and white and gold narcissists, notes and roses of all shades, carnations, heavy-headed trails of Westeria, wild hyacinths, violets, deep crimson, and orange ranunculus, geek juice, or wild riruses, the Florence emblem, so deeply purple as to be almost black, anemones, spring beauties, faintly tinted wood blooms, tidying large loose nose gaze, i. b., fruit blossoms, everything that can be thought of that is fair and sweet. These enticing wears, the old man would tip out on the table. Mr. Asher and Catty would select what they wanted, and then the process of bargaining would begin, with a witch no sailors complete in Italy. The old man would name an enormous price, five times as much as he hoped to get. Catty would offer a very small one, considerably less than she expected to give. The old man would dance with the smay, wrink his hands, assure them that he should die of hunger on all his family with him, if he took less than the price named, he would then come down half a frag in his demand. So it would go on for five minutes. Ten, sometimes for a quarter of an hour, the old man's price gradually descending, and Catty's terms very slowly going up, ascent or two at a time. Next, the giantess would mingle with the fray. She would bounce out of her kitchen, berate the flower-bender, snatch up his flowers, declare that they smelled badly, fling them down again, pouring out all the white unbelievable charade of reproaches, under violins, and looking so enormous in her excitement that Catty wondered that the old man dared to answer her at all. Finally, there would be a sudden lull. The old man would shrug his shoulders, and remarking that he and his wife and his aged grandmother must go without bread that day, since it was the senora's will, take the money offered on the part, leaving such a mass of flowers behind him that Catty would begin to think that they had paid an unfair price for them, and to feel a little rueful till she observed that the old man was absolutely dancing downstairs with rapture over the good bargain he had made, and that Maria was black with indignation over the extravagance of her ladies. The Americani and a nation of spin-trips she would mutter to herself, as she quickened the charcoal in her droll little range by finding it with a palm-lift fan. They squander money like water, well, all the better for us Italians, with a shrug of his shoulders. But Maria, it was only 16 cents that we paid, and look at those flowers. They are at least half a bushel of them. 16 cents for garbage like that. The senorina would better let me make her bargains for her. Gia, Gia, no Italian lady would have paid more than 11 sews for such useless roba. It is evident that the senorina's countrymen eat gold when at home, they think so little of casting it away. Altogether, what with the comfort and quiet of this little home, the numberless delightful things that there were to do and to see and busused great library from which they could draw brooks at will to make the doing and seeing more intelligible. The month at Florence passed only too quickly and was one of the times to which they afterward looked back with most pleasure. Amy grew steadily stronger and the freedom from anxiety about her after their long strain of apprehension was restful and healing with an expression to both mind and body. End of chapter 11 part 1 of what Catty did next.