From the window, across the intervening plot of ground, we saw our neighbour stooping over one of those small portable affairs so popular in Italy and known as _scaldini_, mere iron buckets in which coke or charcoal burns without flame, and which are carried from room to room as occasion arises. "I thought," I said, "that she was Italian. That is a _scaldino_." "Is it?" said Bill. "They'll set the house on fire if they use that here." My friend is rather hard on the Mediterranean nations, giving as a reason "they are so dirty," but meaning, I imagine, that they lack our habits of order and dignified reticence. Their colonies in American cities and country-side are not models for town-planners and municipal idealists. And Bill has, in addition, much of the average Englishwoman's suspicion of foreign domestic economy. The past glories of Greece and Spain and Rome are nothing to her if the cooking utensils of the present generation are greasy or their glassware unpolished. There is, when one gets well away from them, quite a Dutch primness and staid rectangularity about English ideals in the matter of front and back yards, hen-runs, flower-beds and the like. And although her own small tract of New Jersey woefully failed to come anywhere near those same ideals she had a weakness for the gentle disparagement of Latin untidiness and lack of finish. But, firm believers as we were in the authentic picturesqueness of American life, if we only looked for it, we had been struck more than once by the fugitive glimpses of herself which our neighbour had so far vouchsafed to us. To tell the bald truth, we stood in awe of her. We discriminated between her and her environment. And we paid to her, in spite of our prejudices and limitations, a certain homage which beauty ever commands and receives, so potent is its inspiration to the hearts of men.