your way amid the many
stumbling-blocks that beset it, till you have reached the stair, (a
narrow stair and dark, and encumbered like the passage, with numerous
relics of antiquity,) a female voice, loudly shrilling from above,
demands your business--"_Chi c'e?_"--you answer of course "_Amico_," and
are bid to mount accordingly. Arrived at the summit of the stair, that
same voice, the high-pitched key of which startled you from below,
sounds less disagreeable, now that you are close beside the fair
proprietress of it, who at once greets you affably, begs you to be
seated, has seated herself beside you, and, premising that her
"_marito_" will appear anon, has begun to ask you a hundred questions,
some of which you are relieved from answering by the actual advent of
Signor B----, who makes his politest bow, while Madame introduces you as
an old acquaintance. You see at a glance _this_ part of Signor B----'s
history, that he has bought a young and pretty wife out of many years'
traffic in antiquities. Whatever else he may at any other time have
purchased, was with intention to dispose of afterwards, a suitable
opportunity offering. But this pretty wife he keeps like an inedited
coin, or fancies that he keeps to himself entirely. Few antiquaries have
shown more enterprise than B----. Possessed of little, very little money
in his youth, he did not, like many other Roman youths of this day,
squander it away in cigars, and was under twenty when he undertook his
first commercial expedition. He went into Egypt, could not buy the
Pyramids, they were too large for his portmanteau; then into Greece;
then to Sicily. He sailed to Syracuse, landed at Naxos, sacked Taormina
and Catania; came back and sold his curiosities well; went abroad again,
and again returned like an industrious bee laden with spoils. Enriched
at length by these numerous journeys, he was able to purchase a
vineyard, and to plant it. His next step was to build a villa upon it,
and to marry an ancient dame, who, dying shortly, left him at liberty to
marry again. The lady whom he now calls his own being at the time poor,
his treasures soon won her heart, while his house flattered her
ambition, and so they made a match of it; and she now accompanies him in
most of his antiquarian prowling excursions during the summer; and the
_menage_, on the whole, for an Italian menage, goes on well enough.

One day--(this was when, by much frequentation of the premises, we had
bec