fashions were French; but here still lingers the
lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white
veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive
cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white
veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends
and modifies age and ugliness.

The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time
of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar;
and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I
know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves,
and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long
suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the
eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great
self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their
little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an
income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless
gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and
means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are
as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively
cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity
that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining
surface.

We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the
public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and
gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it
is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was--

"Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"

the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going
by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known
better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland
the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare
say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reentered
Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one
is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.

After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned
and went