proprieties. The girls secure
their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"

It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent
on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an
English pauper woul