d women.

Sometimes Walter went down to peep into the kitchen. There is always a
great deal going on in a hotel kitchen,--so many turkeys and chickens
and birds and fish to fix for dinner. Walter liked to see them roast a
little pig whole, and then put an ear of corn in his mouth and lay him
on a plate--or make a lobster salad look like a turtle, or a boiled ham
like a _pork_-upine! Then Pietro, the cook, was worth looking at,
himself. He was a great six-footer of an Italian; with eyes--(my
senses, how big and how black they were!) Walter thought he must look
like the robbers that his uncle John, who had been across the seas,
used to tell about. Then, Pietro had such big, fierce whiskers, too,
and always wore a bright scarlet cap, with a long gilt tassel, and
altogether, for a cook, he looked very picturesque--(Aunt Fanny knows
that's a long word, but you must look it out in the dictionary.) When
Pietro got angry with any of the waiters, I promise you he'd make his
frying-pan fly across the kitchen as if it were bewitched, and then
poor little Walter would fly up stairs as fast as his little fat legs
could carry him.

But Pietro was not always cross, for all he looked as though he had
been fed on thunder; no--he often tossed Walter a bunch of raisins, or
a rosy apple; and it was quite beautiful when he _did_ smile, to see
his white teeth glitter. Sometimes, when he was waiting for some dish
to cook, he would take Walter on his knee, and tell him of his own
beautiful bright Italy, where the skies were as soft and blue as
Walter's eyes, and where (if we might believe Pietro) one might dance
and sing and eat grapes forever, without working for them; but when
Walter looked up innocently and said, "then why didn't you stay there,
Pietro?" Pietro would drop him as if he had been a red-hot potatoe, and
hiss something in Italian from between his teeth, that poor little
Walter could not begin to understand; but as he was a pretty sensible
little boy, he always took himself off till Pietro felt better natured,
and asked him no more questions.

One rainy day Walter had wandered all over the hotel, trying to get
amused. The nurse had a friend call to see her, and she had given his
little sisters all Walter's playthings, to keep them quiet, that they
need not trouble _her_; and Walter's mamma told him, when he put his
little head into the drawing-room, that "she didn't care what he did,
if he didn't bother _her_;" so the poor lit