Then would return a vision of some halt in the hills at home, of the dark, cavernous kitchen with its freshly sprinkled brick floor and its bunches of herbs hanging from the high blackened beams overhead shedding their dry fragrance on the air, so cool and refreshing on entering from the burning midday sunshine outside. “Favorisca!” cries the “Sposa”—she may be eighteen or eighty, but that is her title from her wedding day forward—“Condescend to enter! Let the signori be accommodated!” The rush-bottomed chairs are set out on the loggia in the shade, the boys are sent to fetch ice-cool water from the well, and as the bucket goes splashing down into the invisible flood and comes up all diamonds in the sun, “Sposa” brings out four or five heavy glasses, freshly rinsed, in the fingers of one hand and a straw-bound _fiaschetta_ of her own wine in the other. “Vino sincero, signori miei!” she assures you as she sets it down on the deal table already spread with the clean cloth that smells of rosemary. Aye, a “sincere wine,” with no “dope” in its crimson or topaz depths, and the welcome is as sincere as the wine. She pours it out, smiling, her handsome head and rich costume standing out picturesquely against the dark doorway behind her, within which one of her girls is kneeling on the bricks, washing freshly pulled lettuce for your salad in a great copper bowl, hand-beaten and reflecting the light from every one of its red-bronze facets. Everything in the kitchen is of beaten copper; these people would as soon think of cooking in any other metal as of sleeping in cotton sheets—a degradation the poorest scorns to put up with. “Sposa” disappears within the kitchen and one of the girls comes out to entertain the visitors while the dinner is cooking. She stands with one hand on the back of a chair, the other fingering her blue-and-yellow apron, pink with shyness, but devoured with curiosity. Every detail of one’s dress, every bit of jewellery, is being taken in—to be described to all the other girls of the place when they meet at church on Sunday, but she answers one’s questions with a confident smile. How old? Oh, “in seventeen”—that is, sixteen last birthday. Her name? Candiduccia, at the Signora’s service! Betrothed? A pinker flush and an indescribable little movement of the shoulders, and then down goes her head, while “Mammà,” whose sharp ears have heard all, replies in her deep, sonorous tones, from among the pots and pans: “A good youth, but he is getting a bad bargain! This lazy one has not spun half her linen yet. I had mine all spun and woven by the time I was fourteen! Here, thou! come and fetch the plates! The illustrious ones are hungry!”