young helpless wife might have starved. Then, just
after their third child was born, fever came, swept away the sickly
mother and the two eldest children, and attacked Sarti himself, who rose
from his sick-bed with enfeebled brain and muscle, and a tiny baby on his
hands, scarcely four months old. He lodged over a fruit-shop kept by a
stout virago, loud of tongue and irate in temper, but who had had
children born to her, and so had taken care of the tiny yellow,
black-eyed _bambinetto_, and tended Sarti himself through his sickness.
Here he continued to live, earning a meagre subsistence for himself and
his little one by the work of copying music, put into his hands chiefly
by Maestro Albani. He seemed to exist for nothing but the child: he
tended it, he dandled it, he chatted to it, living with it alone in his
one room above the fruit-shop, only asking his landlady to take care of
the marmoset during his short absences in fetching and carrying home
work. Customers frequenting that fruit-shop might often see the tiny
Caterina seated on the floor with her legs in a heap of pease, which it
was her delight to kick about; or perhaps deposited, like a kitten, in a
large basket out of harm's way.

Sometimes, however, Sarti left his little one with another kind of
protectress. He was very regular in his devotions, which he paid thrice
a-week in the great cathedral, carrying Caterina with him. Here, when the
high morning sun was warming the myriad glittering pinnacles without, and
struggling against the massive gloom within, the shadow of a man with a
child on his arm might be seen flitting across the more stationary
shadows of pillar and mullion, and making its way towards a little tinsel
Madonna hanging in a retired spot near the choir. Amid all the
sublimities of the mighty cathedral, poor Sarti had fixed on this tinsel
Madonna as the symbol of divine mercy and protection,--just as a child,
in the presence of a great landscape, sees none of the glories of wood
and sky, but sets its heart on a floating feather or insect that happens
to be on a level with its eye. Here, then, Sarti worshipped and prayed,
setting Caterina on the floor by his side; and now and then, when the
cathedral lay near some place where he had to call, and did not like to
take her, he would leave her there in front of the tinsel Madonna, where
she would sit, perfectly good, amusing herself with low crowing noises
and see-sawings of her tiny body. And when