s quaint pleasantries had a
zest that inspired the Paronsina and her mother to shout them into his
dull ears, that he might lose none of them. He laughed a kind of faded
laugh at them, and, rubbing his pale hands together, showed by his act
that he did not think his best wine too good for his kindly guest. The
signora feigned to take the same delight shown by her father and
daughter in Tonelli's drolleries; but I doubt if she had a great sense
of his humor, or, indeed, cared anything for it save as she perceived
that it gave pleasure to those she loved. Otherwise, however, she had a
sincere regard for him, for he was most useful and devoted to her in her
quality of widowed mother; and if she could not feel wit, she could feel
gratitude, which is perhaps the rarer gift, if not the more respectable.

The Little Mistress was dependent upon him for nearly all the pleasures
and for the only excitements of her life. As a young girl she was at
best a sort of caged bird, who had to be guarded against the youth of
the other sex as if they, on their part, were so many marauding and
ravening cats. During most days of the year the Paronsina's parrot had
almost as much freedom as she. He could leave his gilded prison when he
chose, and promenade the notary's house as far down as the marble well
in the sunless court, and the Paronsina could do little more. The
signora would as soon have thought of letting the parrot walk across
their campo alone as her daughter, though the local dangers, either to
bird or beauty, could not have been very great. The green-grocer of
that sequestered campo was an old woman, the apothecary was gray, and
his shop was haunted by none but superannuated physicians; the baker,
the butcher, the waiters at the caffe were all professionally, and, as
purveyors to her family, out of the question; the sacristan, who
sometimes appeared at the perruquier's to get a coal from under the
curling-tongs to kindle his censer, had but one eye, which he kept
single to the service of the Church, and his perquisite of
candle-drippings; and I hazard little in saying that the Paronsina might
have danced a polka around Campo San Giuseppe without jeopardy so far as
concerned the handsome wood-carver, for his wife always sat in the shop
beside him. Nevertheless, a custom is not idly handed down by mother to
daughter from the dawn of Christianity to the middle of the nineteenth
century; and I cannot deny that the local perruquier, th