There were many times when Joe would have none of my help. When we were staying on the Riviera he would go every day into the town in the rattling little omnibus that plied along the dusty road, succeeding by sheer kindred _bonhomie_ in making friends with the drivers and rejoicing at the abusive epithet of “ugly microbe” suggested by some late epidemic, with which they used at the time merrily to bombard one another. His best crony amongst the friends of my childhood was the old priest of our Apennine village who had taught me the piano when I was a little girl, in exchange--as he always averred--for my instruction in my own tongue. I’m afraid his conversational English was little credit to me and not much better than Joe’s Italian, although the old man was a scholar and had taught himself enough, with occasional help from my father, to read Shakespeare in the original. He pronounced the name with every vowel broad and separate, as in his Latin; this was easy in that case, but when he wanted to tell which were his “four favourite poets”--in which list he included musicians--he was sore put to it for the pronunciation of Byron, Beethoven and Bach. But Joe taught him more than I had done at ten years old, for which the old man upbraided me again as he would have done in my baby days. I can see him standing in his shabby cassock beneath his pergola with the sun filtering through the vines on to the hanging bunches of purple fruit, and shaking his finger at me with mock solemnity as of yore. “When she was four years old she told me I spoke English like a Spanish cow,” said he, quoting a Genoese proverb. “But she taught me badly.” And then he related--what I refused at first to translate--how he had had to whip me for stealing his currants. “Grapes she might have had--but English currants, they require _watering_.” And grapes _we_ had too, as many as we could devour. In their natural form Joe could pluck and eat them gladly too; but when it came to the sour wine which the _Prevosto_ had made from them and with which he served him at table, I am bound to confess that my husband risked disgracing me by spilling it on the brick floor when his host’s back was turned; and on one occasion he even went so far as to pour a whole half _fiasco_ through the little window which separated the refectory from the church, where he bespattered the marble pavement behind the high altar. But these delinquencies remained a secret, and “Giò” became the old man’s loved and patient instructor and friend.