This was too much. It was like the lady who attributed the decline of the Italian opera to the fact that singers would no longer “podge” their voices. “And what, pray, is ‘podging’?” enquired my informant of the lady. “Why, don’t you understand what ‘podging’ is? Well, I don’t know that I can exactly tell you, but I am sure Edith and Blanche podge beautifully.” However, I said that metaphysics were _la filosofia_ and this quieted him. He left poetry and turned to prose. “Then you shall like much the works of Washington Irving?” I was grieved to say that I did not; but I dislike Washington Irving so cordially that I determined to chance another “No.” “Then you shall like better Fenimore Cooper?” I was becoming reckless. I could not go on saying “No” after “No,” and yet to ask me to be ever so little enthusiastic about Fenimore Cooper was laying a burden upon me heavier than I could bear, so I said I did not like him. “Oh, I see,” said the boy; “then it is _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ that you shall like?” Here I gave in. More “Noes” I could not say, so, thinking I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a mutton chop, I said that I thought _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ one of the most wonderful and beautiful books that ever were written. Having got at a writer whom I admired, he was satisfied, but not for long. “And you think very much of the theories of Darwin in England, do you not?” I groaned inwardly and said we did. “And what are the theories of Darwin?” Imagine what followed! After which: “Why do you not like poetry?—You shall have a very good university in London?” and so on. Sunday Morning at Soglio The quarantine men sat on the wall, dangling their legs over the parapet and singing the same old tune over and over again and the same old words over and over again. “Fu tradito, fu tradito da una donna.” To them it was a holiday. Two gnomes came along and looked at me. I asked the first how old it was; it said fourteen. They both looked about eight. I said that the flies and the fowls ought to be put into quarantine, and the gnomes grinned and showed their teeth till the corners of their mouths met at the backs of their heads. The skeleton of a bird was nailed up against a barn, and I said to a man: “Aquila?” He replied: “Aquila,” and I passed on. The village boys came round me and sighed while they watched me sketching. And the women came and exclaimed: “Oh! che testa, che testa!” And the bells in the windows of the campanile began, and I turned and looked up at their beautiful lolling and watched their fitful tumble-aboutiness. They swung open-mouthed like elephants with uplifted trunks, and I wished I could have fed them with buns. They were not like English bells, and yet they rang more all ’Inglese than bells mostly do in Italy—they had got it, but they had not got it right.