As somebody said of us that summer, we were a "cosmopolitan mess," a hotch-potch of nationalities, such as is always found in so general a rendezvous as Italy. We were rather less of a hotch-potch, however, than in London, but somehow it seemed to us that our peculiarities were more salient than they could ever appear in proper and conventional Bloomsbury. We were largely German, as the travelling population of Italy is. In Bloomsbury our medium of expression was the English language, and English was the language at table, no matter how foreign our company. But in this Italian _pensione_, where the faces were continually changing, the languages changed as often. One day only English was the rule, and those who could not unite with the majority remained mute. Another day, with a tremendous incursion of Teutons, who always seem to travel in hordes, only German gutturals held the table, and we who had no facility with them muttered meek French or sullen English to our neighbors. The next day French would be the rule, and Teuton must mumble in it and Anglo-Saxon stammer or hold its peace. Curiously enough, although we were in Italy, Italian was rarely, almost never, spoken among us, our only use of it being in orders to the servants. Our landlady was English, with an Italian husband, but they both held only upper menial places in the establishment, and never dreamed of sitting at table with us or of meeting us upon any terms of equality. This want of familiarity with Italian proves how little mere travellers and haunters of _pensioni_ ever know of the middle-class inhabitants of the country. The Italians themselves stir from home very seldom; they almost never admit foreigners into their own houses, and when forced abroad seek cheap Italian inns rather than the innumerable boarding-houses infested by the outer barbarian. Italian peasant life is open to all foreigners, but not that of the middle classes. Our landlord had a daughter whose cheek was pale and whose garments hung loosely upon her. When first we remarked this and her heavy eye, everybody laughed. "The usual story,--loves and rides away," was remarked in various languages. It was heartless to laugh, but we could not help it. For wan and drooping landlords' daughters had become so familiar to us in Italian _pensioni_ that we needed only to glance at the set of each one's gown and the tint of her cheek to know if HE were still present and wooing or had faithlessly ridden away. The race, however, was not always to the rider.