st attitude
and graceful figure that made her conspicuous among all her kneeling
companions, with their gay kerchiefs and bright gowns. When she rose and
sat down, with folded hands and eyes downcast, there was something so
pensive in her subdued mien that I could not take my eyes from her. To
say that she had the rich olive complexion, with the gold struggling
through, large, lustrous black eyes, and harmonious features, is only
to make a weak photograph, when I should paint a picture in colors and
infuse it with the sweet loveliness of a maiden on the way to sainthood.
I was sure that I had seen her before, looking down from the balcony of
a villa just beyond the Roman wall, for the face was not one that even
the most unimpressible idler would forget. I was sure that, young as she
was, she had already a history; had lived her life, and now walked amid
these groves and old streets in a dream. The story which I heard is not
long.

In the drawing-room of the Villa Nardi was shown, and offered for sale,
an enormous counterpane, crocheted in white cotton. Loop by loop, it
must have been an immense labor to knit it; for it was fashioned in
pretty devices, and when spread out was rich and showy enough for the
royal bed of a princess. It had been crocheted by Fiammetta for her
marriage, the only portion the poor child could bring to that sacrament.
Alas! the wedding was never to be; and the rich work, into which her
delicate fingers had knit so many maiden dreams and hopes and fears, was
offered for sale in the resort of strangers. It could not have been want
only that induced her to put this piece of work in the market, but the
feeling, also, that the time never again could return when she would
have need of it. I had no desire to purchase such a melancholy coverlet,
but I could well enough fancy why she would wish to part with what must
be rather a pall than a decoration in her little chamber.

Fiammetta lived with her mother in a little villa, the roof of which is
in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left
of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver
olive-boughs,--a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd
angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons
and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where
physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that
lowest class, the young girls of which are little more