y use of fishing boats with sails up,--but
still an interloper. Now I became one of the thousand families and the
million children. These were all in evidence in less than ten seconds;
the peculiar quality of that scream had done it; not only from the top
story of the highest rookery did they swarm, but from every near-by
campo, and way back to the shipyards.

Luigi pushed the gondola to the quay and I lifted out the water-soaked,
blue-lipped little tot, her hair flattened against her cheeks (she was
laughing now,--"It was nothing," she said, "my foot slipped,") and
placed her in the hands of the longest-armed fishwife; and then Luigi
disappeared into a door, level with the quay, from which he reappeared
ten minutes later in a suit of dry clothes, the property of a
fisherman, and of so grotesque a fit, the trousers reaching to his
knees and the cuffs of the coat to his elbows, that he set the
population in a roar. My Luigi, you might as well know, is six feet and
an inch, with the torso of a Greek god and a face that is twin to
Colleone's, and, furthermore, is quite as distinguished looking as that
gentleman on horseback, even if he does wear a straw hat instead of a
copper helmet. After this Loretta became part of my establishment,
especially at luncheon time, Luigi hunting her up and bringing her
aboard in his arms, she clinging to his grizzled, sunburned neck. Often
she would spend the rest of the day watching me paint.

All I knew of her antecedents and life outside of these visits was what
Luigi told me. She was born, he said, in the shipyards, and at the
moment lived in the top of the rookery nearest the bridge. She had an
only sister, who was ten years older; the mother was the wife of a crab
fisherman who had died some years before; the two children and mother
were cared for by a brother crab fisherman. His son Francesco, if
report were true, was to marry the sister when she turned fifteen,
Francesco being four years older. This last reference to Francesco came
with a shake of the head and a certain expression in Luigi's eyes which
told me at once that his opinion of the prospective groom was not for
publication--a way he has when he dislikes somebody and is too polite
to express it.

"Fishes for crabs, like his father?" I asked.

"Yes, crabs and young girls," he answered with a frown. "A poor lot,
these crab catchers, Signore. Was it the charcoal or a brush you
wanted?"

Francesco did not interest me,--no