side door, like Ajax defying the lightning.

He rubbed his hands, and listened to a torrent of excited Italian from
no fewer than ten crazy clerks. Then I stated the case in English. The
proprietor turned to Mrs. Jimmie, and said if madam was so sure that
she had worn a ring, which all his clerks assured him she had not
worn, then, for the honor of his house, he must beg madam to choose
another ring, of whatever value she liked, and it should be a present
from him!

Now, Mrs. Jimmie is a very Madonna of calmness, but at that she
ignited. She told him that Tiffany had been six months matching those
stones, and that not in all his shop--not in the whole of Italy--could
he find a duplicate. At that another search took place, and I, just to
make things pleasant, started for the American ambassador's. (I had
risen a peg from Cook's!) Such pleading! Such begging! Two of the
clerks actually wept--Italian tears. When lo! a shout of triumph, and
from a remote corner of the shop, quite forty feet from us, in a place
where we had not been, under a big vase, they found that ring! If it
had had the wings of a swallow it could not have flown there. If it
had had the legs of a centipede it could not have crawled there. The
proprietor was radiant in his unctuous satisfaction. "It had rolled
there!" Rolled! That ring! It had no more chance of rolling than a
loaded die! We all sniffed, and sniffed publicly. Mrs. Jimmie, I
regret to say, was weak enough to buy the ring she had ordered for
Jimmie in spite of this occurrence. But I think I don't blame her. I
am weak myself about buying things. But _that_ is a sample of Italian
honesty, and in a shop which would rank with our very best in New York
or Chicago. Heaven help Italy!

Italian politeness is very cheap, very thin-skinned, and, like the
French, only for the surface. They pretend to trust you with their
whole shop; they shower you with polite attentions; you are the Great
and Only while you are buying. But I am of the opinion that you are
shadowed by a whole army of spies if you owe a cent, and that for lack
of plenty of suspicion and prompt action to recover I am sure that
neither the Italians nor the French ever lost a sou.

We went into the best tortoise-shell shop in all Naples to buy one
dozen shell hair-pins, but such was the misery we experienced at
leaving any of the treasures we encountered that we bought three
hundred dollars' worth before we left, and of course did not