e modern Italian commercial gentleman
(who is often a German, and not infrequently a Jew) has learned some of
the tourist's exactions. It is thanks to him, presumably, that even at
out-of-the-way Vallanza there exists a decent inn.

Our friends' sitting-room was on the first floor, a corner room, having
two sets of windows. One set commanded the Piazza, with its grey old
church (the Cathedral of St. Paul and St. Guy), its detached campanile,
its big central fountain, and, occupying the entire eastern side, the
crumbling frescoed front of the Palazzo Rosso. The other set looked
across the Riva, and its double row of palms, out upon the bay, with
its anchored ships, its fishing-boats, its encircling olive-covered
hills, dotted high and low by villages and villas, and its embosomed
Islets, Isola Nobile, Isola Fratello, Isola Sorella, the whole wide
prospect glowing in the sun.

The Piazza, which opens to the north, lay in cool blue shadow; and just
now a market was in progress there, a jumble-scene of merchandise,
animals, and humanity; men, women, and children, dogs and donkeys,
goats, calves, pigs, poultry; vegetables and fruit--quartered melons,
with green rind, black seeds, and rosy flesh, great golden pumpkins,
onions in festoons, figs in pyramids; boots, head-gear, and rough
shop-made clothing, for either sex; cheap jewellery also; and every
manner of requisite for the household, from pots and pans of wrought
copper, brass lamps, iron bedsteads and husk-filled bedding, to
portraits in brilliant oleograph of King and Queen and the inevitable
Garibaldi. The din was stupendous. Humanity hawked, chaffered,
haggled, laughed, vituperated. Donkeys brayed, calves mooed, dogs
barked, ducks quacked, pigs squealed. A dentist had set up his chair
near the fountain, and was brawling proffers of relief to the
tooth-distressed. Sometimes a beglamoured sufferer would allow himself
to be taken in hand; and therewith, above the general blare and blur of
noise, rose clear and lusty a series of shameless Latin howls. The
town-crier, in a cocked hat, wandered hither and thither, like a soul
in pain, feebly beating his drum, and droning out a nasal proclamation
to which, so far as was apparent, no one listened. The women, for the
most part, wore bright-coloured skirts,--striped green and red, or blue
and yellow,--and long black veils, covering the head, and falling below
the waist; the men, dark jerseys, corduroy trousers, red