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the notary's office a year hence; and my mother wishes it, and so it must be." And I did my best not to look up to the jackdaws circling round the towers, or the old river running away to Rome. For all the waters cried to me to leap, and all the birds to fly.

And you cannot tell, unless you had been born to do it, as I was, how good it is to climb, and climb, and climb, and see the green earth grow pale beneath you, and the people dwindle till they are small as dust, and the houses fade till they seem like heaps of sand, and the air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face, and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so close to you that you seem to bathe in them, and the winds toss the mists and part them, and go by you, down to the world below to torment the trees, and the sea, the men at work, and the roofs that cover them, and the sails of their ships in the ocean; men are so far from you, and heaven seems so near; the fields and the plains are lost in the vapors that divide you from them, and all the noise of living multitudes comes only very faintly to your ear, and sweetly, like the low murmuring of bees in the white blossoms of an acacia in the month of May. But you do not understand this, you poor toilers in cities, who pace the streets and watch the faces of the rich.

And I, to whom this life of the upper air was joy, was ecstasy, I was doomed to be a notary's clerk; I-called Pipistrello (the bat), because I was always whirling and wheeling in the air-was to be a clerk, so my mother and grandmother decided for me, with the old notary himself who lived at the corner, and made his daily bread by carrying fire and sword, where he could, through the affairs of his neighbors. He was an old rascal, but my mother did not know that; he promised to be a safe and trustworthy guardian of my youth, and she believed he had power to keep me safe from all dangers of destiny. She wanted to be sure that I should never run the risks of my father's career; she wanted to see me always

before the plate of herb-soup on her table. Poor mother!

One day in Orte chance gave me another fate than this of her desires. One fine sunrise on the morning of Palm Sunday I heard the sharp sound of a screeching fife, the metallic clash of cymbals, the shouts of boys, the rattle of a little drum. It was the rataplan beating before a troop of wrestlers and jugglers who were traversing the Marche and Reggio-Emilia. The troop stationed themselves in a little square, burnt by the sun and surrounded by old crumbling houses; I ran with the rest of the lads of Orte to see them. Orte was in holiday guise; aged, wrinkled, deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that day with palms and lilies and lilac, and the branches of willow; and her people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and the churches, and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and pressure around the play-place of the strollers. It was in the month of April; outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of a million daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "welcome," because on his little horn he blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my youth! I am old now, aye, old; though I have lived through only twenty-five years.

This afternoon on Palm Sunday I ran to see the athletes, as a moth flies to the candle; in Italy all the world loves the Saltimbank, be he dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed, I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my brothers! Were they not my brothers all? This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom, like an old picture full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a

somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts who came to amuse the town; the troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron, they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father did before them. As for me, I watched them, stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, blind, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes.

It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say, intoxicated with joy, and with recollection and with longing:—and my mother destined me to a notary's desk and wished me to be shut there all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all the crime, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of gold! She wished me to be a notary's clerk? I gazed at these men who seemed to me so happy; these slender, agile, vigorous creatures, in their skins that shone like the skin of green snakes, in their broidered, glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps, with the white plume in each- "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished, crossed the cord that marked the arena, and threw his strong arms about me and cried, "You are the little Pippo!" For he had been my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went with them.-Pipistrello.

THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME.

A Faun lives in this Ponte Listo water. Often in these days I heard him laughing, and under the splashing of the spouts caught the tinkle of his pipe. In every one of the fountains of my Rome a naiad, or a satyr, a god, or a genius, has taken refuge, and in its depths dreams of the ruined temples and the levelled woods, and hides in its cool, green, moss-growing nest

all day long, and, when the night falls, wakes and calls aloud.

Water is the living joy of Rome. When the sky is yellow as brass, and the air sickly with the fever-mist, and the faces of men are all livid and seared, and all the beasts lie faint with the drought, it is the song of the water that keeps our life in us, sounding all through the daylight and the darkness across the desert of brick and stone. Men here in Rome have "written their names in water," and it has kept them longer than bronze or marble. When one is far away across the mountains, and can no more see the golden wings of the archangel against the setting sun, it is not of statues and palaces, not of Cæsars or senators, not even of the statues, that you think with wistful, longing remembrance and desire: it is of the water that is everywhere in Rome, floating, falling, shining, splashing, with the clouds mirrored on its surface, and the swallows skimming its foam.

I wonder to hear them say that Rome is sad, with all that mirth and music of its water laughing through all its streets, till the steepest and stoniest ways are murmurous with it as any brook-fed forest-depths. Here water is Protean: sovereign and slave, sorcerer and servant; slaking the mule's thirst, and shining in porphyry on the prince's terrace; filling the well in the cabbage-garden, and leaping aloft against the Popes' palace; first called to fill the baths of the Agrippines and serve the Naumachia of Augustus, it bubbles from a griffin's jaws or a wolf's teeth, or any other of the thousand quaint things set in the masonry at the streetcorners, and washes the people's herbs and carrots, and is lapped by the tongues of dogs, and thrashed by the bare brown arms of the washing-women; first brought from the hills to flood the green Numidian marble of the thermæ and lave the limbs of the patricians between the cool mosaic walls of the tepidarium, it contentedly becomes a household thing, twinkling like a star at the bottom of the deep old wells in dusky courts, its rest broken a dozen times a day by the clash of the chain on the copper pail, above it the carnations of the kitchen balcony and the caged blackbird of the cook.

One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where you will, there is the water: whether it foams by Trevi, where the green moss grows in it like ocean-weed about the feet of the ocean god, or whether it rushes, reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an old lion that once saw Cleopatra ; whether it leaps high in air trying to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's, or pours its triple cascade over the Pauline granite, or spouts out of a great barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as Arachne's web in a green garden-way where the lizards run, or in a crowded corner where the fruitseller sits against the wall;-in all its shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging melody all through the year.-Ariadne.

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