. To cheer up
the poet, to whom his mingled failure and glory were doubly painful,
she thumped him on the back, laughed with her mouth full, saying in her
hideous jargon, that it was not worth while for such a trifle to fling
oneself head downwards from the _campanile del Duomo_.

[Illustration: p069-080]

"Isn't it true, _il cato?_" she added turning to the old tom-cat
crippled by rheumatism, snoring in front of the fire. Then suddenly, in
the middle of an interesting discussion, she screamed out to her husband
in a voice senseless and brutal as the crack of a rifle:

"Hey! artist! _la lampo qui filo!_"

The poor fellow immediately interrupted his conversation to wind up the
lamp, humble, submissive, anxious to avoid the scene he dreaded, and
which in spite of all, he did not escape.

On returning from the theatre we had stopped at the _Maison d'Or_ to get
a bottle of choice wine to wash down the _estoufato_. All along the road
Maria Assunta had piously carried it under her shawl, and on her arrival
she had placed it on the table where she could cast tender looks upon
it, for Roman women are fond of good wine. Already twice or three times
mistrustful of her husband's absence of mind, and the length of his
arms, she had said:

"Mind the _boteglia_--you're going to break it."

At last, as she went off to the kitchen to take up with her own hands
the famous _estoufato_, she again called out to him:

"Whatever you do, don't break the _boteglia_."

Unluckily, the moment his wife had disappeared, the poet seized the
opportunity to talk about art, theatres, success, so freely and with so
much gusto and vivacity, that--crash! By a gesture more eloquent than
the others, the wonderful bottle was thrown down and fell to the ground
in a thousand pieces. Never have I beheld such terror. He stopped short,
and became deadly pale. At the same moment, Assunta's contralto was
heard in the next room, and the Italian appeared on the threshold with
flashing eyes, lips swollen with rage, red with the heat of the kitchen
range.

"The _boteglia!_" she roared in a terrible voice.

Then timidly bending down to me, he whispered:

"Say it's you."

And the poor devil was so frightened, that I felt his long legs tremble
under the table.

[Illustration: p075-086]

A COUPLE OF SINGERS.

How could they help falling in love? Handsome and famous as they both
were, singing in the same operas, living each night during five whole