But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence, and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more free and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens of the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft on people's heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking like veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that the whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more rich and various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial existence of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of gayety and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and particolored harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a multitude of masks, set in eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the guise of monkeys, bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to be akin to; a great many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls and women, no doubt, in breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous heads and all manner of such easy monstrosities and exaggerations.. It is strange how the whole humor of the thing, and the separate humor of each individual character, vanishes the moment I try to grasp it and describe it; and yet there really was fun in the spectacle as it flitted by--for instance, in the long line of carriages a company of young men in flesh-colored tights and chemises, representing a party of girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves, while an old nurse in the midst of them expressed ludicrous horror at their predicament. Then the embarrassment of gentlemen who, while quietly looking at the scene, are surrounded by groups of maskers, grimacing at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging them, dancing round them, till they snatch an opportunity to escape into some doorway; or when a poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is whitened all over with a half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock sympathy with which his case is investigated by a company of maskers, who poke their stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the unchangeable grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some shy, harmless personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her passionate love in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a hundred other nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest are not the least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a harlequin's sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried pease or corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of absurdity one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an ass and almost filling the Corso with the circumference of crinoline from side to side.