e reminded of Italy!" Teresa lifted her ugly hands in bewilderment.
"Reminded of Italy--in London?"

"Is there no Italian music in London?" Carmina asked suggestively.

The duenna's bright eyes answered this in their own language. She
snatched up the nearest newspaper.

It was then the height of the London concert season. Morning
performances of music were announced in rows. Reading the advertised
programmes, Carmina found them, in one remarkable respect, all alike.
They would have led an ignorant stranger to wonder whether any such
persons as Italian composers, French composers, and English composers
had ever existed. The music offered to the English public was music of
exclusively German (and for the most part modern German) origin. Carmina
held the opinion--in common with Mozart and Rossini, as well as other
people--that music without melody is not music at all. She laid aside
the newspaper.

The plan of going to a concert being thus abandoned, the idea occurred
to them of seeing pictures. Teresa, in search of information, tried her
luck at a great table in the middle of the room, on which useful books
were liberally displayed. She returned with a catalogue of the Royal
Academy Exhibition (which someone had left on the table), and with the
most universally well-informed book, on a small scale, that has ever
enlightened humanity--modestly described on the title-page as an
Almanac.

Carmina opened the catalogue at the first page, and discovered a list of
Royal Academicians. Were all these gentlemen celebrated painters? Out
of nearly forty names, three only had made themselves generally known
beyond the limits of England. She turned to the last page. The works of
art on show numbered more than fifteen hundred. Teresa, looking over her
shoulder, made the same discovery. "Our heads will ache, and our feet
will ache," she remarked, "before we get out of that place." Carmina
laid aside the catalogue.

Teresa opened the Almanac at hazard, and hit on the page devoted
to Amusements. Her next discovery led her to the section inscribed
"Museums." She scored an approving mark at that place with her
thumbnail--and read the list in fluent broken English.

The British Museum? Teresa's memory of that magnificent building
recalled it vividly in one respect. She shook her head. "More headache
and footache, there!" Bethnal Green; Indian Museum; College of Surgeons;
Practical Geology; South Kensington; Patent Museum--all unknown