s with the locomotives, and
placing our old experiences at the service of our new employers.

In the meanwhile we made Genoa our headquarters, and hired a couple of
rooms over a small shop in a by-street sloping down to the quays. Such a
busy little street--so steep and winding that no vehicles could pass
through it, and so narrow that the sky looked like a mere strip of
deep-blue ribbon overhead! Every house in it, however, was a shop, where
the goods encroached on the footway, or were piled about the door, or
hung like tapestry from the balconies; and all day long, from dawn to
dusk, an incessant stream of passers-by poured up and down between the
port and the upper quarter of the city.

Our landlady was the widow of a silver-worker, and lived by the sale of
filigree ornaments, cheap jewellery, combs, fans, and toys in ivory and
jet. She had an only daughter named Gianetta, who served in the shop,
and was simply the most beautiful woman I ever beheld. Looking back
across this weary chasm of years, and bringing her image before me (as I
can and do) with all the vividness of life, I am unable, even now, to
detect a flaw in her beauty. I do not attempt to describe her. I do not
believe there is a poet living who could find the words to do it; but I
once saw a picture that was somewhat like her (not half so lovely, but
still like her), and, for aught I know, that picture is still hanging
where I last looked at it--upon the walls of the Louvre. It represented
a woman with brown eyes and golden hair, looking over her shoulder into a
circular mirror held by a bearded man in the background. In this man, as
I then understood, the artist had painted his own portrait; in her, the
portrait of the woman he loved. No picture that I ever saw was half so
beautiful, and yet it was not worthy to be named in the same breath with
Gianetta Coneglia.

You may be certain the widow's shop did not want for customers. All
Genoa knew how fair a face was to be seen behind that dingy little
counter; and Gianetta, flirt as she was, had more lovers than she cared
to remember, even by name. Gentle and simple, rich and poor, from the
red-capped sailor buying his earrings or his amulet, to the nobleman
carelessly purchasing half the filigrees in the window, she treated them
all alike--encouraged them, laughed at them, led them on and turned them
off at her pleasure. She had no more heart than a marble statue; as Mat
and I discovered by-a