Maestro Ercole De Pretis lives in the Via Paola, close to the Ponte
Sant' Angelo, in a most decent little house--that is, of course, on a
floor of a house, as we all do. But De Pretis is well-to-do, and he
has a marble door plate, engraved in black with his name, and two
sitting-rooms. They are not very large rooms, it is true, but in
one of them he gives his lessons, and the grand piano fills it up
entirely, so that you can only sit on the little black horsehair sofa
at the end, and it is very hard to get past the piano on either side.
Ercole is as broad as he is long, and takes snuff when he is not
smoking. But it never hurts his voice.

It was Sunday, I remember, for he had to sing in St. Peter's in the
afternoon; and it was so near, we walked over with him. Nino had never
lost his love for church music, though he had made up his mind that it
was a much finer thing to be a primo tenore assoluto at the Apollo
Theatre than to sing in the Pope's choir for thirty scudi a month. We
walked along over the bridge, and through the Borgo Nuovo, and across
the Piazza Rusticucci, and then we skirted the colonnade on the left,
and entered the church by the sacristy, leaving De Pretis there to put
on his purple cassock and his white cotta. Then we went into the
Capella del Coro to wait for the vespers.

All sorts of people go to St. Peter's on Sunday afternoon, but they
are mostly foreigners, and bring strange little folding chairs, and
arrange themselves to listen to the music as though it were a concert.
Now and then one of the young gentlemen-in-waiting from the Vatican
strolls in and says his prayers, and there is an old woman, very
ragged and miserable, who has haunted the chapel of the choir for many
years, and sits with perfect unconcern, telling her beads at the foot
of the great reading-desk that stands out in the middle and is never