knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.

But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central
principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to
the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard
not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff
and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much
frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth,
are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but she
is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age,
unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression. She has
brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a strawberry
formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly shrunken
effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough,
pleasant, indestructible woman--for use, we thought, not ornament--the
mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of serving-women.

I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to pilfering;
but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot repress a
feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She strictly
accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and to this
end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding as in some
sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed by her own
confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On settling with
her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is all in capital
letters,--each the evident result of serious labor,--with figures
representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold and original
conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of creative genius.
The only difficulty under which the author labors in regard to the book is
the confusion naturally resulting from the effort to get literature right