signore," and then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a
reverie in which that crude accent even must have sounded like a gossip's
or a kinsman's voice, but never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see
who passed or lingered. There could have been little else in his
circumstances to remind him of home, and if he was really in the sort of
day-dream attributed to him, he was wise not to look about him. I have not
myself been in Lucca, but I conceive that its piazza is not like our
square, with a pump and horse-trough in the midst; but that it has
probably a fountain and statuary, though not possibly so magnificent an
elm towering above the bronze or marble groups as spreads its boughs of
benison over our pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it to
set the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the brimming buckets to the
smoking nostrils of the horses, while out from the stable comes clanging
and banging with a fresh team that famous African who has turned white,
or, if he is off duty, one of his brethren who has not yet begun to turn.
Figure, besides, an expressman watering his horse at the trough, a
provision-cart backed up against the curb in front of one of the stores,
various people looking from the car-office windows, and a conductor
appearing at the door long enough to call out, "Ready for Boston!"--and
you have a scene of such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in her
piazza at high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo Santo, if the
Lucchese had cared to look round the corner of the meeting-house at its
moss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home,
though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not for
them of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial slates
with their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, as if by the
softening of creeds and customs, to cherub's heads,--not for him is the
pang I feel because of those who died, in our country's youth exiles or
exiles' children, heirs of the wilderness and toil and hardship. Could
they rise from their restful beds, and look on this wandering Italian with