t gates; which seem only waiting for a
troop of knights and soldiers to pass through, and with a blast of
their bugles awake the ancient inhabitants of the crooked streets, and
fill them once more with the picturesque crowds of the middle ages.

We can imagine that the old owners are but lying asleep in their many
storied gothic palaces, their vaulted courtyards, and shady loggias;
ready to rub their eyes and come out as they hear the well-known
sounds ringing across the wide piazza.

But the knights never come, and the old people go on sleeping; and the
new people walk about the streets, and haggle at the market, and drive
their country carts with the great patient white oxen, and crowd on
Sunday up the broad Cathedral steps to kneel in the dim light before
the lighted altar, as generations have done before them.

All round the town stretches the open country. Low sandy hills dotted
with olive and cyprus trees, melting into a blue sweep of mountains;
and about a mile from one of the gates stands the rambling white house
with closed shutters in which Maddalena, the housekeeper, lived alone
with her two grandchildren.

She was a kind old woman and fond of the twins, who had been left
orphans when they were mere babies, but she often thought that surely
no grandmother had ever been plagued before, as she was plagued by
Tuttu and Tutti.

"When they were infants it was easy enough," she would declare to a
sympathizing neighbour. "Give them a fig or something to play with,
and they were perfectly happy; but at times now I am tempted to wish
they had no legs, what with accidents and mischief.--Not that they're
not fine children, and may be a comfort to my old age, but it's a
harassing thing, waiting."

It was certainly a fact that Tuttu and Tutti were constantly in
mischief; and yet their curly black heads, red cheeks, and great brown
eyes, were so attractive, that people--even those whose property had
been seriously injured by them--treated them leniently, and let them
off with a scolding.

The twins were always repentant after one of their misfortunes, and
made serious promises of amendment; but at the next temptation they
forgot all their good resolutions, and never remembered them until
they were in disgrace again.

Grandmother Maddalena devised numerous punishments for the children,
such as tacking a cow's head cut out of red stuff, on their backs,
when they had teazed Aunt Eucilda's cow--or tieing them up by o