hes, lent a certain grace and comic charm
to the commonplace of festivity. The entertainment was theirs as much as
mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took the form by degrees of
curiously complicated hospitality. I do not think a well-ordered supper
at any _trattoria_, such as at first suggested itself to my imagination,
would have given any of us an equal pleasure or an equal sense of
freedom. The three children had become the guests of the whole party.
Little Attilio, propped upon an air-cushion, which puzzled him
exceedingly, ate through his supper and drank his wine with solid
satisfaction, opening the large brown eyes beneath those tufts of
clustering fair hair which promise much beauty for him in his manhood.
Francesco's boy, who is older and begins to know the world, sat with a
semi-suppressed grin upon his face, as though the humour of the
situation was not wholly hidden from him. Little Teresa too was happy,
except when her mother, a severe Pomona, with enormous earrings and
splendid _fazzoletto_ of crimson and orange dyes, pounced down upon her
for some supposed infraction of good manners--_creanza_, as they vividly
express it here. Only Luigi looked a trifle bored. But Luigi has been a
soldier, and has now attained the supercilious superiority of
young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in the piazza and
knows the merits of the different cafes.

The great business of the evening began when the eating was over, and
the decanters filled with new wine of Mirano circulated freely. The four
best singers of the party drew together; and the rest prepared
themselves to make suggestions, hum tunes, and join with fitful effect
in choruses. Antonio, who is a powerful young fellow, with bronzed
cheeks and a perfect tempest of coal-black hair in flakes upon his
forehead, has a most extraordinary soprano--sound as a bell, strong as a
trumpet, well-trained, and true to the least shade in intonation. Piero,
whose rugged Neptunian features, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough
water-life, boasts a bass of resonant, almost pathetic quality.
Francesco has a _mezza voce_, which might, by a stretch of politeness,
be called baritone. Piero's comrade, whose name concerns us not, has
another of these nondescript voices. They sat together with their
glasses and cigars before them, sketching part-songs in outline,
striking the keynote--now higher and now lower--till they saw their
subject well in view. Then they burst into fu