r lullaby than the noises of streets, and the sweetness of
the myrtle blossom is better to breathe than the warm air of rooms. To
wander in spring beneath the sun by day and the moon by night along the
sea's edge is a good life, a beautiful life, a cheerful and certainly an
amusing life. Social adventures crowd the road. There are pleasant people
along this shore of little blue bays. Besides the ordinary natives of the
towns and the country-side, and besides the residents in the hotels
(whose uses to vagabonds are purely financial) there is on this shore a
drifting and incalculable population, heterogeneous, yet with a note of
character common to all. A population cosmopolitan and shifting, living
from hand to mouth, vagrants of the road or of the street corner, finding
life a warm and easy thing in this long garden shut between hills and
sea. So warm and lovely and easy a garden is it that it has for that
reason become a lee shore; a shore where the sick and the sad and the
frail and the unfortunate are driven by the winds of adversity to find
a sheltered peace. On the shore all things may be given up; there is no
need to hold with effort any possession, even life itself, for all things
become gifts, easily bestowed and tranquilly received. You may live on
extremely little there, and win that little lightly. You may sell things
along the road for some dealer, or for yourself--plaster casts, mosaic
brooches, picture postcards, needlework of divers colours. If you have
a small cart drawn by a small donkey, you are a lucky man, and can carry
your wares about in it and sell them at the hotels, or in the towns at
fair-time. If you possess an infant son, you can carry him also about in
the cart, and he will enjoy it. Also, if your conversation is like the
sun's, with a friendly aspect to good and bad, you will find many friends
to beguile the way. You may pick them up at fairs, on _festa_ days, like
blackberries.

On Santa Caterina's day, the 30th of April, there is a great _festa_ in
the coast towns. They hold the saint in especial honour on this shore,
for she did much kindness there in plague-time. Vagabonds with wares to
sell have a good day. There was, on one Santa Caterina's day, a young
man, with a small donkey-cart and a small child and a disreputable yellow
dog, who was selling embroidery. He had worked it himself; he was working
at it even now, in the piazza at Varenzano, when not otherwise engaged.
But a fair is to