his native tongue.

"Speak that some more; I like it," said Cherry softly.

"Yes; and you are like it, and, like all that belongs to my Italian,
beautiful and graceful," said Giovanni, dropping the liquid accents
as lovingly from his lips as if they had been a kiss. Then, in the
imperfect English he generally spoke, he asked of Teddy,--

"Where did the child come from?"

"She's my little sister," replied the boy doggedly.

The Italian shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows,
muttering in his own tongue,--

"I never heard or saw any child above there in the first weeks of my
living here. But what affair is it of mine? The child I have lost is
safe with the Holy Mother!"

He crossed himself, and muttered a prayer; then from behind the
stove, where he lay warming himself, pulled a little creature, at
sight of whom Cherry uttered a scream, and clung to Teddy.

"It's the monkey, sissy; it's Jovarny's monkey; and his name is
Pantaloons," explained Teddy.

"Pantalon," corrected the monkey's master; and snapping his fingers,
and whistling to the monkey, he called him to his shoulder, and made
him go through a number of tricks and gestures,--some of them so