clamoured for coppers. These children, by the way, were the
handsomest little brats in the world, and, each was furnished
with a pair of eyes that could only have signified the protest of
nature against the meanness of fortune. They were very nearly as
naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those
of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books of travel; but
as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grinning
like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry little
teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of
happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of
innocence and the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed,
if ever a child was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was
the most expressively beautiful creature I had ever looked upon.
He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave; and yet here
he was running wild among the sea-stunted bushes, on the lonely
margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank or to how
dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with propriety;
though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature
will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own
republic, straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned
and catechised, marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an
object often seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always
remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by,
this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all
youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad
who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague,
and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken
nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious,
reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St.
Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical