the sunshine. The mother comes down
again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
come.

Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting
in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the wh