nd they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups
and their ices with their newspaper and their talk. Not so many ladies
are to be seen as at the caffe in Venice, for it is only in the greater
cities that they go much to these public places. There are few students
at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffe; but you may nearly
always find there some Professor of the University, and on the evening
of which I speak, there were two present besides our abbate. Our
friend's great passion was the English language, which he understood too
well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been translating from that
tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our talk was of these at
first. Then we began to talk of distinguished American writers, of whom
intelligent Italians always know at least four, in this
succession,--Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe's
_Capanna di Zio Tom_ is, of course, universally read; and my friend had
also read _Il Fiore di Maggio_,--"The Mayflower." Of Longfellow, the
"Evangeline" is familiar to Italians, through a translation of the poem;
but our abbate knew all the poet's works, and one of the other
Professors present that evening had made such faithful study of them as
to have produced some translations rendering the original with
remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his _brochure_,
printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus,"
"Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of
the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon
Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces which give the Italians a fair notion
of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor
Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young
and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, published only a few
months since a translation of "The Golden Legend"; and Professor
Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet's
longer works on which the translator of the "Evangeline" is now engaged.

At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of
our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons.
To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.

"Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."

"We mean those under the Villa P----."

"Exactly."

There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's voice;
and afte