es are
mostly of stone, with slated roofs. There are some fine stores in the
Place Royal that are quite as grand as those in Paris. There are also
some old, old churches black with age, dim and vast inside, with
statuary on the outer walls, and splendid gothic towers that seem to
blossom all over with stone flowers as they climb so far up into the sky
above the quaint old town.

Round about the town are gardens and summer houses, pleasant walks and
drives, vineyards, groves and all the things that go to make a charming
rural scene.

In the Place Graslin is a fine theatre and a handsome Town Hall. Of
these buildings more presently when we come to see what happened within
them.

In this old French town in June 1846 there lived a very little girl just
four years old. Her home was on the first floor of a small house on a
narrow street not far from the Place de la Monnaie, an open square that
led into one of the principal streets known as the Rue Voltaire. The
house was built in the usual French fashion with a large arch-way under
the house that led into a court-yard in the centre. The front door
opened into the shady arch-way, and the window balconies were filled
with flowering plants in pots.

Her name was Camilla. Her father Monsieur Salvatore Urso played the
flute in the orchestra at the theatre, or opera house, and on Sundays
played the organ at the Church of the Holy Cross that stood facing a
little square not far from the river.

Her mother Madame Emelie Urso was a young and very handsome woman, and a
fine singer. She also helped her husband in his music lessons. She was
born in Lisbon in Portugal, but as she had come to France when quite
young, she had forgotten her mother tongue and now spoke French and
Italian. This last may have been owing to the fact that her husband was
from Palermo, Sicily. With Camilla's parents lived her mother's sister,
Caroline, whom we shall know as aunt Caroline. This made the Urso
household.

Both of Camilla's parents were young and she was their oldest child and
only daughter. There was at this time a baby brother and later there
were three more brothers. The first four years of the little one's life
were passed in an uneventful manner, very much in the fashion of other
children everywhere. When she was four years old she began to go to the
theatre with her father. Every night she put her small hand in his and
trotted off to the Place Graslin to sit with him in the orchestra amo