great promise, and with tears in his eyes, he recommended him to
preserve carefully the secret of the macaroni, to Frenchify his name,
and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the
clouds which obscured it--this was practiced then as in our day, to
order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous painter,
whom he named, should design two queens' portraits, with these words as
a legend: "To The Medici."

The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient
time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of
which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc pieces, and then expired.

Cropoli the younger, like a man of good heart, supported the loss with
resignation, and the gain without insolence. He began by accustoming the
public to sound the final i of his name so little, that by the aid of
general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole, which
is quite a French name. He then married, having had in his eye a little
French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry by
showing them what there was beneath the slab of the chimney.

These two points accomplished, he went in search of the painter who was
to paint the sign; and he was soon found. He was an old Italian, a rival
of the Raphaels and the Caracci, but an unfortunate rival. He said he
was of the Venetian school, doubtless from his fondness for color. His
works, of which he had never sold one, attracted the eye at a distance
of a hundred paces; but they so formidably displeased the citizens, that
he had finished by painting no more.

He boasted of having painted a bath-room for Madame la Marechale
d'Ancre, and mourned over this chamber having been burnt at the time of
the marechal's disaster.

Cropoli, in his character of a compatriot, was indulgent towards
Pittrino, which was the name of the artist. Perhaps he had seen the
famous pictures of the bath-room. Be this as it may, he held in such
esteem, we may say in such friendship, the famous Pittrino, that he took
him in his own house.

Pittrino, grateful, and fed with macaroni, set about propagating the
reputation of this national dish, and from the time of its founder,
he had rendered, with his indefatigable tongue, signal services to the
house of Cropoli.

As he grew old he attached himself to the son as he had done to the
father, and by degrees became a kind of overlooker of a house in which
his remarkable integrit