hall, staircase, and the rooms appropriated to himself, with his own
hands. His servant had done the greater part of the upholstery. The two
between them had got the garden into order.

The Italians seemed to have taken a joint love to the place, and to deck
it as they would have done some favourite chapel to their Madonna.

It was long before the natives reconciled themselves to the odd ways of
the foreign settlers. The first thing that offended them was the
exceeding smallness of the household bills. Three days out of the seven,
indeed, both man and master dined on nothing else but the vegetables in
the garden, and the fishes in the neighbouring rill; when no trout could
be caught they fried the minnows (and certainly, even in the best
streams, minnows are more frequently caught than trout). The next thing
which angered the natives quite as much, especially the female part of
the neighbourhood, was the very sparing employment the two he creatures
gave to the sex usually deemed so indispensable in household matters. At
first, indeed, they had no woman-servant at all. But this created such
horror that Parson Dale ventured a hint upon the matter, which Riccabocca
took in very good part; and an old woman was forthwith engaged after some
bargaining--at three shillings a week--to wash and scrub as much as she
liked during the daytime. She always returned to her own cottage to
sleep. The man-servant, who was styled in the neighbourhood "Jackeymo,"
did all else for his master,--smoothed his room, dusted his papers,
prepared his coffee, cooked his dinner, brushed his clothes, and cleaned
his pipes, of which Riccabocca had a large collection. But however close
a man's character, it generally creeps out in driblets; and on many
little occasions the Italian had shown acts of kindness, and, on some
more rare occasions, even of generosity, which had served to silence his
calumniators, and by degrees he had established a very fair reputation,--