was chosen as one of the boys and girls who were to
preach between Christmas and the New Year in the church of Ara Croeli,
before the image of Jesus. I had no fear, and it seemed decided that I,
of all children, gave most delight; but after me came a little girl of
exquisitely delicate form, bright countenance, and so melodious a voice
that even my mother, with all her pride of me, awarded her the palm, and
declared that she was just like an angel. But I had often to repeat my
speech at home, and then made up a new one describing the festival in
the church, which was considered just as good.

One moonlit evening, on returning with my mother from a visit in
Trastevere, we found a crowd in the Piazza di Trevi, listening to a man
singing to a guitar--not songs like those which I had so often heard,
but about things around him, of what we saw and heard, and we ourselves
were in the song. My mother told me he was an improvisatore; and
Federigo, our artist lodger, told me I should also improvise, for I was
really a poet. And I tried it forthwith--singing about the foodshop over
the way, with its attractively set out window and the haggling
customers. I gained much applause; and from this time forth I turned
everything into song.

My first visit to the country ended in a sad event, which was to shape
the whole course of my life. It was in June, and my mother and her
friend Mariuccia took me to see the famous flower fete at Genzano. We
stayed the night at an inn, and in the morning joined the dense holiday
crowd that moved over the carpet of flowers on the pavement of the main
street. Suddenly there was a piercing cry--a pair of unmanageable horses
rushed through. I was thrown down, and all was blackness. When I awoke,
Mother of God, I lay with my head on Mariuccia's lap, beside the
lifeless form of my mother, crushed by the carriage wheel! The occupant
of the carriage, a gentleman of the Borghese family, had escaped with a
shaking, and sent a servant in rich livery with a purse containing
twenty scudi for the motherless child.

Mariuccia took me back to Rome; it was decided that her parents, who
kept flocks in the Campagna--honest people to whom my twenty scudi would
be wealth--should take charge of me. Thus, in the dreary Campagna, with
honest Benedetto and kindly Domenica, I spent the summer and the early
autumn in the ancient tomb which they had transformed into a hut. The
first week it rained incessantly; then, with the