work daily for small earnings, but under
favourable conditions, and their labour has been lightened by much
good-fellowship among themselves, by the amusements of their _feste_ and
their singing clubs.

Of course it is not easy for a stranger in a very different social
position to feel that he has been admitted to their confidence. Italians
have an ineradicable habit of making themselves externally agreeable, of
bending in all indifferent matters to the whims and wishes of superiors,
and of saying what they think _Signori_ like. This habit, while it
smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment and
partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us
Northern folk break in vain efforts. Our advances are met with an
imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are bent
on making the world pleasant to us. It is the very reverse of that dour
opposition which a Lowland Scot or a North English peasant offers to
familiarity; but it is hardly less insurmountable. The treatment, again,
which Venetians of the lower class have received through centuries from
their own nobility, makes attempts at fraternisation on the part of
gentlemen unintelligible to them. The best way, here and elsewhere, of
overcoming these obstacles is to have some bond of work or interest in
common--of service on the one side rendered, and good-will on the other
honestly displayed. The men of whom I have been speaking will, I am
convinced, not shirk their share of duty or make unreasonable claims
upon the generosity of their employers.

FORNOVO.

In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the
past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny
and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and
disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of
this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of
the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that
only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely
_sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished
courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendor of their purfled silks
and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has yielded to sullen
cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin and unreverend age. All that was
satisfying to the senses and distracting to the eyesight in their
transitory pomp has passed away,