his plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan dancers and deities, they
would hold his wares little better than Romish saints and idolatries, and
would scarcely have the sentimental interest in him felt by the modern
citizen of Charlesbridge; but I think that even they must have respected
that Lombard scissors-grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge to
all the cutlery in the house.

He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came eighteen years ago, and
whither he has returned,--as he told me one acute day in the fall, when
all the winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered earthward
in the grove across the way,--to enjoy a little climate before he died
(_per goder un po' di dima prima di morire_). Our climate was the
only thing he had against us; in every other respect he was a New-
Englander, even to the early stages of consumption. He told me the story
of his whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had left Milan
and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there.
Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business of
greengrocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than in
Naples, because of the deeper wickedness of the Athenians, who cheated him
right and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans were
bad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks!--and he spat the
Greeks out in the grass. At last, after much misfortune in Europe, he
bethought him of coming to America, and he had never regretted it, but for
the climate. You spent a good deal here,--nearly all you earned,--but then
a poor man was a man, and the people were honest. It was wonderful to him
that they all knew how to read and write, and he viewed with inexpressible
scorn those Irish who came to this country, and were so little sensible of
the benefits it conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best city in
America, and "Tell me," said he, "is there such a thing anywhere else in
the world as that Public Library?" He, a poor man, and almost unknown, had