cook-shop.

As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent people
to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was not hard, and
consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to extraordinary efforts
when G. had attempted to please us with some novelty in cooking. She held
us to a strict account in this respect; but indeed our applause was for
the most part willing enough. Her culinary execution, first revealing
itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of roast potatoes,--a delicacy
foreign to the Venetian kitchen,--culminated at last in the same style of
_polpetti_ [Footnote: I confess a tenderness for this dish, which is
a delicater kind of hash skillfully flavored and baked in rolls of a
mellow complexion and fascinating appearance.] which furnished forth the
table of our neighbor, the Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.

But G.'s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her
the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great
babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when
there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad
weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The
crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as
springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse
is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of opprobrium
with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the attribution
of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near us, and G.
declared the place to have become unendurable--"_proprio un campo di
sospiri!_" (Really a field of sighs.) "_Staga comodo!_" she said
to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass between
him and the wall. "Don't move; the way to Paradise is not wider than
this." We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in the