eps there, rumbling over the tufa road, to or from
the Campagna, and around the seat were painted in gay colors various
patterns of things unknown. In the autumn, vine-branches with pendent,
rustling leaves decorate hood and horse, while in spring or summer, a
bunch of flowers often ornaments this gay-looking wine-cart.

The interior of the shop was dark, dingy, sombre, and dirty enough to
have thrown an old Flemish Interior artist into hysterics of delight.
There was an _olla podrida_ browniness about it that would have
entranced a native of Seville; and a collection of dirt around, that
would have elevated a Chippeway Indian to an ecstasy of delight. The
reed-mattings hung against the walls were of a gulden ochre-color, the
smoked walls and ceiling the shade of asphaltum and burnt sienna, the
unswept stone pavement a warm gray, the old tables and benches very rich
in tone and dirt; the back of the shop, even at midday, dark, and the
eye caught there glimpses of arches, barrels, earthen jars, tables and
benches resting in twilight, and only brought out in relief by the faint
light always burning in front of the shrine of the Virgin, that hung on
one of the walls.

In a wine-shop this shrine does not seem out of place, it is artistic;
but in a lottery-office, open to the light of day, and glaringly
common-place, the Virgin hanging there looks much more like the goddess
Fortuna than Santa Maria.

But they are inside the wine-shop, and the next instant a black-haired
gipsy-looking woman with flashing, black eyes, warming up the sombre
color of the shop by the fiery red and golden silk handkerchief which
falls from the back of her head, Neapolitan fashion, illuminating that
dusky old den like fireworks, asks them what they will order?

'A foglietta of white wine.'

'Sweet or dry?' she asks.

'Dry,' (_asciutto_,) said Rocjean.

There it is on the table, in a glass flask, brittle as virtue, light as
sin, and fragile as folly. They are called Sixtusses, after that pious
old Sixtus V. who hanged a publican and wine-seller sinner in front of
his shop for blasphemously expressing his opinion as to the correctness
of charging four times as much to put the fluoric-acid government stamp
on them as the glass cost. However, taxes must be raised, and the
thinner the glass the easier it is broken, so the Papal government
compel the wine-sellers to buy these glass bubbles, forbidding the sale
of wine out of any thing else save t