r again as one by one the evidences
of his existence accumulated and developed in our consciousness. It grew
to be quite a game with us, this collection of data, and filled in much
of our leisure before we became acquainted with many of our neighbours.

I think Bill was the first to notice something unusual about the family
next door, something neither English nor American. "What do you think!"
she exclaimed, coming in one morning as I was busy writing. "She's got a
little iron grate on legs, and there's charcoal burning in it."

"Who? Where?" I asked, coming out of my work with a start. I was
composing an advertisement at the time.

"Mrs. Carville," said Bill, pointing to the window.

From the window, across the intervening plot of ground, we saw our
neighbour stooping over one of those small portable affairs so popular
in Italy and known as _scaldini_, mere iron buckets in which coke or
charcoal burns without flame, and which are carried from room to room as
occasion arises.

"I thought," I said, "that she was Italian. That is a _scaldino_."

"Is it?" said Bill. "They'll set the house on fire if they use that
here."

My friend is rather hard on the Mediterranean nations, giving as a
reason "they are so dirty," but meaning, I imagine, that they lack our
habits of order and dignified reticence. Their colonies in American
cities and country-side are not models for town-planners and municipal
idealists. And Bill has, in addition, much of the average Englishwoman's
suspicion of foreign domestic economy. The past glories of Greece and
Spain and Rome are nothing to her if the cooking utensils of the present
generation are greasy or their glassware unpolished. There is, when one
gets well away from them, quite a Dutch primness and staid
rectangularity about English ideals in the matter of front and back
yards, hen-runs, flower-beds and the like. And although her own small
tract of New Jersey woefully failed to come anywhere near those same
ideals she had a weakness for the gentle disparagement of Latin
untidiness and lack of finish.

But, firm believers as we were in the authentic picturesqueness of
American life, if we only looked for it, we had been struck more than
once by the fugitive glimpses of herself which our neighbour had so far
vouchsafed to us. To tell the bald truth, we stood in awe of her. We
discriminated between her and her environment. And we paid to her, in
spite of our prejudices and limitations, a