adorn every Roman
balcony, one could see into the penetralia of a dozen Roman families and
wrest thence the most vital secrets--even to how much _Romano_ Alfredo
drank at dinner or whether lemon-juice or sour wine gave piquancy to
Rosina's salad. Entirely unacquainted with these descendants of ancient
patrician or pleb, the Leatherstonepaughs ventilated original and
individual theories concerning them, and gave them names of their own
choosing.

[Illustration: A CASE OF NON-REMITTANCE.]

"Rameses the Great has quarrelled with the Sphinx and is flirting with
the Pyramid," whispered young Cain one day as some of the family,
leaning over the iron railing, looked into the leafy, azure-domed vault
below, and saw into the dining-room of a family whose mysteriousness of
habit and un-Italian blankness of face gave them a fanciful resemblance
to the eternal riddles of the Orient.

The "Pyramid," whose wide feet and tiny head gave her her triangular
title, was evidently a teacher, for she so often carried exercise-books
and dog-eared grammars in her hand. She chanced at that moment to glance
upward. "Lucia," she cried to the Sphinx, speaking with an Italian
accent that she flattered herself was to the down-gazers an unknown
tongue, "do look up to the fifth _loggia_. If there isn't the Huge Bear,
the Middle-sized Bear and the Wee Bear looking as if they wanted to come
down and eat us up!"

"Y' ain't fat 'nuf," yelled the Wee Bear before the elder Bruins had
time to squelch him.

The studio-salon of the Leatherstonepaughs amid the clouds and chimneys
of the Eternal City was a chapter for the curious. It was as spacious as
a country meeting-house, as lofty as befits a palace. It was frescoed
like some of the modern pseudo-Gothic and pine cathedrals that adorn the
village-greens of New England hamlets, and its _pot-pourri_ of artistic
ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged
Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the
spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian
heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla.
This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a
multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the
color-loving eye like a dream of plum-pudding after a nightmare of
mince-pie. Through this magnificence had drifted, while yet the
Leatherstonepaughs saw Rome in all its idealizing mists, gener