et been rendered fastidious in
this respect by the artistic inventions that have been provided for
more civilized but perhaps not happier childhood. There will also be
a store of masks, colored dominoes, harlequins' dresses, monstrous and
outrageous pasteboard noses, and, especially and above all, every kind
of contrivance for making a noise. In this latter kind the peculiar
and characteristic specialty of the day are straight tin trumpets
some four or five feet in length. These are in universal request among
young and old; and the general preference for them is justified by the
peculiarly painful character of the note which they produce. It is a
very loud and vibrating sound of the harshest possible quality. One
feels when hearing it as if the French phrase of "skinning the ears"
were not a metaphorical but a literal description of the result of
listening to the sound. And when hundreds of blowers of these are
wandering about the streets in all parts of the town, but especially
in the neighborhood of the Piazza Navona, making night hideous with
their braying, it may be imagined that those who go to their beds
instead of doing homage to the Befana have not a very good time of it
there.

It is a curious thing that the Italians, who are denizens of "the land
of song," should take especial delight in mere abundance of discordant
noise. Yet such is unquestionably the case. They are in their festive
hours the most noisy people on earth. And the farther southward you
go the more pronounced and marked is the propensity. You may hear boys
and men imitating the most inharmonious and vociferous street-cries
solely for the purpose of exercising their lungs and making a noise.
The criers of the newspapers in the streets must take an enthusiastic
delight in their trade; and I have heard boys in the street who had
no papers to sell, and nothing on earth to do with the business,
screaming out the names of the different papers at the hour of their
distribution at the utmost stretch of their voices, and for no reason
on earth save the pleasure of doing it--just as one cock begins to
crow when he hears another.

The crowd on the piazza is so thick and close-packed that it is a
difficult matter to move in any direction when you are once within it,
but good-humor and courtesy are universal. An Italian crowd is always
the best-behaved crowd in the world--partly, I take it, from the
natural patience of the people, and the fact that nobody