Piccola lived in Italy, where the oranges grow, and where all the year
the sun shines warm and bright. I suppose you think Piccola a very
strange name for a little girl; but in her country it was not strange
at all, and her mother thought it the sweetest name a little girl ever
had.

Piccola had no kind father, no big brother or sister, and no sweet
baby to play with and to love. She and her mother lived all alone in
an old stone house that looked on a dark, narrow street. They were
very poor, and the mother was away from home almost every day, washing
clothes and scrubbing floors, and working hard to earn money for her
little girl and herself. So you see Piccola was alone a great deal of
the time; and if she had not been a very happy, contented little
child, I hardly know what she would have done. She had no playthings
except a heap of stones in the back yard that she used for building
houses, and a very old, very ragged doll that her mother had found in
the street one day.

But there was a small round hole in the stone wall at the back of her
yard, and her greatest pleasure was to look through that into her
neighbor's garden. When she stood on a stone, and put her eyes close
to the hole, she could see the green grass in the garden, smell the
sweet flowers, and even hear the water plashing into the fountain. She
had never seen any one walking in the garden, for it belonged to an
old gentleman who did not care about grass and flowers.

One day in the autumn her mother told her that the old gentleman had
gone away, and had rented his house to a family of little American
children, who had come with their sick mother to spend the winter in
Italy. After this, Piccola was never lonely, for all day long the