The Last Lady, as they now called the wicked bust, had swallowed all but a dollar or two of the bank’s capital, but for what remained to give them a new start Bridget was full of thanksgiving. She had rationed the outfit with a small supply of codfish, with which to make the indispensable Neapolitan _baccalà_; a generous measure of the cheap but enduring lupine beans, some bacon, red onions, and a half dozen loaves of secondhand bread. So well had she managed the finances that a balance of forty-seven cents was left in the treasury. Soon after the blue smoke began writhing from the chimney she had a pot of soup on the stove, and hungrily Domenico and Bertino busied themselves in the current of its gustful odour. They brought leafy boughs from the scrub oaks and fashioned them thickly atop and beside both wings of the iron villa to shield it from the sun’s fire. They made it look like a mound of the plain grown with tangled greenery and pierced by two grottoes straight and smooth as arrow shafts. Of the pipe not used as a kitchen they devised a dormitory, and placed therein the Last Lady, first swathing her tenderly in paper and putting her back in the casing of pine wood. For doors the nankeen sail was made to serve a new turn, but not without a throe of sorrow did the banker cut it in parts and fasten them to the ends of the pipes. The first meal cooked in the villa scullery was a triumph for Bridget’s art. Never in all her Mulberry days had she produced a better _minestrone_. Bertino was asked to a seat at the table, which consisted of a piece of oilcloth spread on the ground. While they sat like tailors in a circle spooning their thick soup from tin plates and munching the secondhand bread, a bobolink and his wife, drawn by the human habitation, dashed above them, weighing the question of becoming neighbours: “...Now they rise and now they fly; They cross and turn, and in and out, and down the middle and wheel about, With a ’phew, shew, Wodolincon; listen to me, Bobolincon!” At length they dropped in the high grass not many yards away, and began laying the foundation for their house, undaunted by the trio of natural nest burglars whose wondering eyes and ears had taken them in. But Mike, Pat, and Biddy never discovered the pale-blue egg that soon lay there; and in the days that followed, when the other Tomatoes and Bertino were afield gathering dandelion leaves, and Bridget sat with her knitting at the kitchen door, the rollicking song of these trustful neighbours was often the only sound that enlivened the desolate moor. When Saturday morning came, and the push-cart was heaped high with the esculent herbs, Signor Tomato said to Bridget: “Guess ees-a better I’m goin’ to de cit for sell-a de salata. See how moocha! Moosta have tree dollar for dat.”