Small matters these--a spot of fortuitous colour, flashing eyes among a people who are always flashing, and a mountaineer with youth in his veins thinking about a well-knit and warm-hued maid who has proved her fire with a blistering tongue. But in the light of all that has come and gone, that stain of yellow may not be wiped out from this record of the warring dilemmas that sharpened the lives of certain little people of the little world wherein we have set foot. CHAPTER IV JUNO THE SUPERB “O dolce Napoli, O suol beato, Ove sorridere, Voile il creato; Tu sei l’impero Dell ’armonia-- Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!” SIGNOR GRABBINI, _impresario_ of the theatre of La Scala, resolved to give up his valiant but ruinous fight for the legitimate drama. Such pieces as Othello, Francesca da Rimini, The Count of Monte Cristo, acted with a complete cast, had proved a strain too severe for the treasury as well as for the capacity of his ten-foot stage. In scenes where the entire company was “on,” the jam became so great that spirited pushing set in, each actor aiming to hold that part of the stage allotted to him by the playbook. In the struggle, conducted sometimes with stealthy art, that the audience might not be aware, toes were trodden upon and tempers badly stirred. Thus it happened that after the curtain had rolled down, the ladies and gentlemen of the company were likely to fall to shaking their fists at one another, naturally to the delight of the audience, who could hear the wordy battle very distinctly. Wherefore Signor Grabbini decided to change the policy of his theatre. One night he stepped before the curtain to make the momentous announcement. Before he could open his mouth a sailor-man, red as Hiawatha, reached over from the wicketed parapet of the gallery and cried: “A clasp of the hand, comrade!” With a gallery so low as that it were folly to court dignity, so the little man shook the big hand and then began his speech, which he punctuated with glances at a piece of white paper that he held. In glittering words he set forth the motives that animated him in deciding upon a change from the plan of amusement that had been so successful, so profitable to himself, and so agreeable to the signori of the company. But it was because he wished to serve better, to captivate even more the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony, that in the future there would be no five-act tragedies, but a veritable banquet every night of short comedies--oh, so laughable!--from the pens of the world’s greatest dramatists, in the true Italian as well as the dialect of sweet Naples. “Bravoes!” from all over the theatre put a stop to the speech for a moment. Men in the orchestra pens leaned over the edge of the stage and lit their cigarettes at the footlights, and, taking advantage of the pause, the meal-cake man shouted his wares. “But this is not all, my friends,” went on Signor Grabbini.