nts in Rome,
corresponding with our Christmas; and the Befana is personated as a
gruff old woman who brings gifts to little children after the manner of
our Saint Nicholas. But in the minds of Romans, from earliest childhood,
the name is associated with the night fair, opened on the eve of the
Epiphany in Piazza Navona, and which was certainly one of the most
extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and make
children of grown people, a sort of foreshadowing of Carnival, but
having at the same time a flavour and a colour of its own, unlike
anything else in the world.

During the days after Christmas a regular line of booths is erected,
encircling the whole circus-shaped space. It is a peculiarity of Roman
festivals that all the material for adornment is kept together from year
to year, ready for use at a moment's notice, and when one sees the
enormous amount of lumber required for the Carnival, for the fireworks
on the Pincio, or for the Befana, one cannot help wondering where it is
all kept. From year to year it lies somewhere, in those vast
subterranean places and great empty houses used for that especial
purpose, of which only Romans guess the extent. When needed, it is
suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, ready to be
put together and regilt or repainted, or hung with the acres of
draperies which Latins know so well how to display in everything
approaching to public pageantry.

At dark, on the Eve of the Epiphany, the Befana begins. The hundreds of
booths are choked with toys and gleam with thousands of little lights,
the open spaces are thronged by a moving crowd, the air splits with the
infernal din of ten thousand whistles and tin trumpets. Noise is the
first consideration for a successful befana, noise of any kind, shrill,
gruff, high, low--any sort of noise; and the first purchase of everyone
who comes must be a tin horn, a pipe, or one of those grotesque little
figures of painted earthenware, representing some characteristic type of
Roman life and having a whistle attached to it, so cleverly modelled in
the clay as to produce the most hideous noises without even the addition
of a wooden plug. But anything will do. On a memorable night nearly
thirty years ago, the whole cornopean stop of an organ was sold in the
fair, amounting to seventy or eighty pipes with their reeds. The
instrument in the old English Protestant Church outside of Porta del
Popolo had been improved