at seven o'clock, and stood up in the early horse-cars to Boston, whence
they will return, with aching backs and quivering calves, half-pendant by
leathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious conveyances, in the
evening. The Italian might go and grind his organ upon the front stoop of
any one of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there would be no arm
within strong enough to thrust him thence; but he is a gentleman in his
way, and, as he prettily explains, he never stops to play except where the
window smiles on him: a frowning lattice he will pass in silence. I behold
in him a disappointed man,--a man broken in health, and of a liver baked
by long sojourn in a tropical clime. In large and dim outline, made all
the dimmer by his dialect, he sketches me the story of his life; how in
his youth he ran away from the Milanese for love of a girl in France, who,
dying, left him with so little purpose in the world that, after working at
his trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he listened to a certain
gentleman going out upon government service to a French colony in South
America. This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said to my organ-
grinder, "Go with me and I make your fortune." So he, who cared not
whither he went, went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a hard
life he led there; and of the wages that had seemed so great in France, he
paid nearly half to his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in his
master's house. The service was not so irksome in-doors, but it was the
hunting beasts in the forest all day that broke his patience at last.

"Beasts in the forest?" I ask, forgetful of the familiar sense of
_bestie_, and figuring cougars at least by the word.

"Yes, those little beasts for the naturalists,--flies, bugs, beetles,--
Heaven knows what."

"But this brought you money?"