I only want to get a word,
My charming girl, from thee.
You know, Ninella, I can't breathe,
Unless your heart's for me!

'Well,' said Caper, 'if this is Italian music, I don't _see_ it.'

The one-legged old gentleman clawed away at the strings of the guitar.

'I say,'_llustrissimo_,' shouted Caper down to him, 'what kind of
strings are those on your instrument?'

'_Excellenza_, catgut,' he shouted, in answer.

'_Benissimo!_ I prefer cats in the original packages. There's a _paolo_:
travel!'

Caper had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of a professor of the
mandolin, a wire-strung instrument, resembling a long-necked squash cut
in two, to be played on with a quill, and which, with a guitar and
violin, makes a concert that thrills you to the bones and cuts the
nerves away.

But the crowning glory of all that is ear-rending and peace-destroying,
is carried around by the _Pifferari_ about Christmas time. It is a
hog-skin, filled with wind, having pipes at one end, and a jackass at
the other, and is known in some lands as the bagpipe. The small shrines
to the Virgin, particularly those in the streets where the wealthy
English reside, are played upon assiduously by the _pifferari_, who are
supposed by romantic travelers to come from the far-away Abbruzzi
Mountains, and make a pilgrimage to the Eternal City to fulfil a vow to
certain saints; whereas it is sundry cents they are really after. They
are for the most part artists' models, who at this season of the year
get themselves up _a la pifferari_, or piper, to prey on the romantic
susceptibilities and pockets of the strangers in Rome, and, with a pair
of long-haired goat-skin breeches, a sheepskin coat, brown rags, and
sandals, or _cioccie_, with a shocking bad conical black or brown hat,
in which are stuck peacock's or cock's feathers, they are ready equipped
to attack the shrines and the strangers.

Unfortunately for Caper there was a shrine to the Virgin in the
second-story front of the house next to where he lived; that is,
unfortunately for his musical ear, for the lamp that burned in front of
the shrine every dark night was a shining and pious light to guide him
home, and thus, ordinarily, a very fortunate arrangement. In the
third-story front room of the house of the shrine dwelt a Scotch artist
named MacGuilp, who was a grand amateur of these pipes, and who declared
that no sound in the world was so sweet to his ear as the bagpipes: they
r