fs over their heads
and went in to Mass. During Mass the sweetness of the church smothered
the saltness of the sea, but when the church-goers came out again into
the hot piazza the sea's breath caught theirs, stealing up to meet them,
calling most insistently, through deep little arches, that framed blue
glimpses like pictures in a row. Going down on to the shore--it lay just
outside the stone streets--one saw how, from the point of Savona in the
west, across to the white gleaming of Genoa, the city of ships, all the
blue bay stretched. Down by the tideless still edge of it a white canoe
with a red stripe waited--a canoe for two (but it held five quite
nicely, if some one sat astride on each end, so that its owners, being
sociably inclined, sometimes took parties of friends).

In the canoe the owners came to Mass, from their house at the very end
of the long town, well outside the stone streets, with a stretch of
white dusty road to be traversed, unless they took the sea-way. Paddling
back across the bay, the canoe landed beneath a little square, dark red
house, with green shutters and a wide veranda and a small sweet-smelling
garden of close-crowded flowers--roses and tall lilies and evening
primroses; and for the trees, oranges and lemons, pomegranates, and
fragrant eucalyptus, and fluttering bamboos, with vine trellises
overhead. The house stood literally on the seashore, so that when the
waves were high they came in through the green iron bars of the gate and
washed the growing things with brine. On one memorable occasion they
flowed in through the basement windows; the exultant household then went
downstairs and floated about on tubs.

Inside, the house was artistic, in an unconventional way of its own; its
owner had been called an eccentric of genius. He had been a lovable
person, wrapped in his own thoughts and his own work, giving his
children most of the things it occurred to them to demand, spoiling them
entirely, and leaving them for the rest to shift for themselves, which
they did, with infinite enjoyment, on the sea and on the hills, and
chiefly in the companionable streets of the town, where they played in
the piazza and talked in the _farmacia_, and loved many friends, and
learnt the art of how to be happy though doing nothing.

No one inquired after their movements, except on occasional mornings
when it occurred to the master of the house that he would teach them
something. Even then they had all the h