leads us to the kitchen door and bids us gaze at her beauty. We
are suitably enthralled at the moment, but we suffer an inevitable
reaction when the meal is served, and sometimes long for a plain
cook.

Peppina is the second maid, and as arrant a coquette as lives in
all Italy. Her picture has been painted on more than one
fisherman's sail, for it is rumoured that she has been six times
betrothed and she is still under twenty. The unscrupulous little
flirt rids herself of her suitors, after they become a weariness to
her, by any means, fair or foul, and her capricious affections are
seldom good for more than three months. Her own loves have no deep
roots, but she seems to have the power of arousing in others
furious jealousy and rage and a very delirium of pleasure. She
remains light, gay, joyous, unconcerned, but she shakes her lovers
as the Venetian thunderstorms shake the lagoons. Not long ago she
tired of her chosen swain, Beppo the gardener, and one morning the
padrona's ducks were found dead. Peppina, her eyes dewy with
crocodile tears, told the padrona that although the suspicion
almost rent her faithful heart in twain, she must needs think Beppo
the culprit. The local detective, or police officer, came and
searched the unfortunate Beppo's humble room, and found no
incriminating poison, but did discover a pound or two of contraband
tobacco, whereupon he was marched off to court, fined eighty
francs, and jilted by his perfidious lady-love, who speedily
transferred her affections. If she had been born in the right
class and the right century, Peppina would have made an admirable
and brilliant Borgia.

Beppo sent a stinging reproof in verse to Peppina by the new