t any one should have the impudence to
ask for money for the carrying out of such a project is merely another
proof of the disease of the age. They might as well form a society and
appeal for funds for suppressing children from laughing or playing in
the streets. They might as well form a society for the strangulation of
all babies. They might as well.... But if I go on like this, I shall get
angry. Thank Heaven, organs are not yet suppressed, though, after the
curtailing of licensed hours, anything is possible. In that event, it
really looks as if America were the only country in which to live,
unless one could find some soft island in the Pacific, where one could
do just as one jolly well pleased.

Let's all go down Eyre Street Hill, for there, you know, organs are
still gurgling, and there are lazy laughter and spaghetti and _dolce far
niente_, and cigarettes are six a penny. There are little restaurants
here hardly bigger than a couple of telephone boxes. They contain but
two tables, and some wooden benches, but about a dozen gloriously savage
boys from Palermo and Naples are noisily supping after their day's tramp
round London with whatever industry they affect. They have olive skins,
black curly hair, flashing eyes, and fingers that dance with gemmy
rings. A new-comer arrives, unhooking from his shoulders the wooden tray
which holds the group of statuettes that he has been hawking round
Streatham and Norwood. He salutes them in mellifluous tones, and sits
down. He orders nothing; but a heaped-up dish of macaroni is put before
him, and he attacks it with fork and finger. There are few women to be
seen, but those few are gaudily arrayed in coloured handkerchiefs, their
mournful eyes and purring voices touching the stern night to beauty. Of
children there are dozens: furious boys and chattering girls. All the
little girls, from four to fourteen, wear socks, and the narrow roadway
flashes with the whirling of little white legs, so that the pedestrian
must dodge his way along as one dancing a _schottische_. A few
public-houses shed their dusty radiance, but these, too, are little
better than dolls' houses. I have never seen village beer-shops so
small. They are really about the size of the front room of a labourer's
cottage, divided into two--Public Bar and Private Bar.

Such is the High Street of Italy, where one feeds. Most of the Italians,
however, live in one of those huge blocks of tenements of which there
are, I