as so kind, so good, so laborious, so cheerful, so gentle, that the
children all younger than he adored him. Tasso was a gardener. Tasso,
however, though the eldest and mainly the bread-winner, was not so much
Moufflou's master as was little Romolo, who was only ten, and a cripple.
Romolo, called generally Lolo, had taught Moufflou all he knew; and that
all was a very great deal, for nothing cleverer than was Moufflou had
ever walked upon four legs.

Why Moufflou?

Well, when the poodle had been given to them by a soldier who was going
back to his home in Piedmont, he had been a white woolly creature a year
old, and the children's mother, who was a Corsican by birth, had said
that he was just like a _moufflon_, as they call sheep in Corsica. White
and woolly this dog remained, and he became the handsomest and biggest
poodle in all the city, and the corruption of Moufflou from Moufflon
remained the name by which he was known; it was silly, perhaps, but it
suited him and the children, and Moufflou he was.

They lived in an old quarter of Florence, in that picturesque zigzag
which goes round the grand church of Or San Michele, and which is almost
more Venetian than Tuscan in its mingling of color, charm, stateliness,
popular confusion, and architectural majesty. The tall old houses are
weather-beaten into the most delicious hues; the pavement is
enchantingly encumbered with peddlers and stalls and all kinds of trades
going on in the open air, in that bright, merry, beautiful Italian
custom which, alas, alas! is being driven away by new-fangled laws which
deem it better for the people to be stuffed up in close, stewing rooms
without air, and would fain do away with all the good-tempered politics
and the sensible philosophies and the wholesome chatter which the
open-street trades and street gossipry encourage, for it is good for the
populace to _sfogare_ and in no other way can it do so one-half so
innocently. Drive it back into musty shops, and it is driven at once to
mutter sedition. . . . But you want to hear about Moufflou.

Well, Moufflou lived here in that high house with the sign of the lamb
in wrought iron, which shows it was once a warehouse of the old guild of
the Arte della Lana. They are all old houses here, drawn round about
that grand church which I called once, and will call again, like a
mighty casket of oxidized silver. A mighty casket indeed, holding the
Holy Spirit within it; and with the vermilion and