slattern; but these unpromising appearances were soon forgotten, and amply made amends for by the intelligence of her remarks, and the sprightliness of her conversation; and we know, "Before such merits all objections fly, Pritchard's genteel, and Garrick six feet high." The _officina_ was a curious place, and worthy of its mistress. It was something between a shambles, a museum, and a tanyard, and exhaled in consequence the mixed effluvia of decomposing flesh, alcohol, tannin, and the oil of petroleum. In one corner stood a large tawny dog, stuffed, and fixed to a board, with a new pair of eyes in his head, and his mouth well furnished with grinders. "_Era molto vecchio questo cane_," going up to introduce him to our notice, and patting his back affectionately: "his sockets have not had such eyes in them for many a day, nor his jaws such teeth. I have strengthened his legs with wire, and restored the proper curl to the tail; nothing further is now lacking but some tufts of hair to cover these bare patches on his haunches, when his master will at once recognise unaltered the favourite of fourteen years ago." "And whence the supplies necessary for your purpose?" "From this," replied she, drawing out from under the table a skin of the same tawny colour, "_Eccola_," and then pinching off with her tweezers a small tuft from the supplementary hide, and gumming over with a camel's hair brush, a bare spot, she proceeded to cover it. "And what's your remedy here?" said we, laying our hand upon a large duck,[3] whose glossy grass-green neck had lost much of its plumage, especially at the base, where it is wont to be, encircled with a cravat of white feathers. "By robbing others of the same family: for I always think a bird, while he lacks any of his feathers, is looking reproachfully at me, and if a parrot could find tongue it might say, ''Tis cruel to look ragged now I'm dead; Annetta, give my tail a little red.' But here are my stores;" and, touching a spring, the door of a small room opened, and revealed unstuffed skins of all sorts, dangling from strings like _Fantoccini_ near the _Sapienza_, at Christmas-time. "Yonder is a bird, Annetta, that shot across our path yesterday in the villa Borghese; was he not then a foreigner of distinction escaped from the prince's aviary?"--"No; a Campagna bird, but rare;" and she proceeded to display his lapis-lazuli wings, which shone like burnished armour, and were set off by a brilliant edging of black feathers, as polished as jet, while the back was a rich dark brown, and the neck and breast light azure. "Oh! stuff us one of these birds, pray!"--"_Non dubitate_, one shall be on his perch expecting you when you return to Rome in November."--"And we must have, too, that beautiful neighbour of his who wears a short silk spencer over his back and shoulders, and a full-breasted waistcoat of buff."--"The Alcedo Hispida: he shall be ready too; they call him hereabouts, 'Martin the Fisher.'"