dangles overhead between two windows, flapping with garments of many colours like a string of signals at sea. For there are windows that look into the courtyard, row above row—and there she is, looking out of one, a red-haired, brown-eyed young creature with broad shoulders and sunburnt throat, a strapping baby trying to wriggle out of its swaddling bands in her arms. In a minute she comes down, and clatters over the broad damp stones in her wooden clogs with yellow velvet toe-caps—and the sight of them sets me dreaming of the Venetian ladies three hundred years ago, picking their way to Mass through the narrow twisting “calle” on clogs, too, but such clogs! A narrow stein, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting on a base not more than two inches wide, and spreading at the top into a pretty little slipper, lined with velvet, and the whole thing was covered with crimson velvet and gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed nails! How any grown woman ever balanced herself on these stilts is a mystery to me still. My father at one time collected ancient footgear, and then forgot all about it; so it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery at the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys that any modern child ever had to play with—several pairs of these exquisitely ornamented “sabots” tumbled in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of the Watteau period—and later. One pair, I remember, with heels like knitting pins, so high that only the very point of the foot touched the ground at all. But, oh, how the little feet that wore them must have suffered! They had certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for the foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically small as the little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless as a clenched fist and almost as broad as it was long.