The Ampezzo Pass and the House of the Star of Gold

OUR month’s voyage of Venice had come to an end. We had said so many times to each other in the mornings “ We must go,” that the meaningless declaration had come to be received with bursts of laughter, and nobody dared say it any more. Nevertheless it was true : people who meant to summer in the Tyrol must not spend the whole of June in Venice. Silent, sad, beautiful Venice, how did our eyes cling to thy spires, as looking backward from the railway carriage we saw them slowly go down in the pale water. That one can leave Venice by rail seems the most incredible thing in life. At the first turn of the wheels and snort of the engine we began to doubt whether the city had been real ; the first sight of green land was bewildering ; and when at the first station we saw wheeled carriages waiting for people, we were struck dumb. What a gigantic and agile creature did the horse appear! and what a marvel of beautiful solidity the level earth, brown under foot, and full of locust hedges and pink-blossomed trees ! It is no small proof of the subtile spell of that wonderful city of water and stone, slowly sinking at anchor, that one month’s life on its bosom is enough to make all other living seem unnatural.

We even felt dull misgivings about the Tyrol, and the dolomite mountains of the grand Ampezzo Pass through which we were to reach it. Nevertheless, “ Ampezzo Pass ” was so stamped upon our whole bearing, that, as soon as we stepped out of the carriage at Conegliano, we were taken possession of by screaming vetturini, each man of whom possessed the very best carriage and the very best horses, and was himself the very best guide in Conegliano ! O the persistence, the superhuman persistence, of an Italian with a hope of money ! Into the inn, into our very bedchamber, followed the man who spoke loudest and fastest.

Sixty francs a day ! O, that was very little. The ladies would not find any other man to go for so small a price. And his horses ! If we could but see his horses !

How energetic grew our Italian ! We would not give sixty francs a day, and we wished to be alone. The dilemma became embarrassing. Women, even if they be American, even if they be three in number, cannot put a man out of a room by main force ; but at last moral force prevailed, and he went surlily away. We took counsel ; it was nearly dark ; we wished to begin our journey early the next morning ; no doubt this vetturino would inform his fellows, and they would combine and agree ; but sixty francs a day was a most exorbitant price for a carriage and two horses ; we would not pay it ; we could go by rail to Innspruck, and give up the Ampezzo Pass. Sadly the two who knew least Italian set forth on errand of research among other vetturini. There is surprising advantage sometimes in conducting such bargains in a language which you do not understand. Armed with a few simple phrases stating time, sum, distance, and obstinately reiterating them, ignorance will sometimes conquer by virtue of its very incapacity.

We had barely crossed the threshold of the inn, when the same fiercemouthed man sprang upon us.

“ Go away. We do not want you. We will not take you.”

Go away, indeed ! as well dismiss our shadow ! Bowing, gesticulating, falling back, and then overtaking, all the while talking like a macaw, he kept on all sides of us, that man of Conegliano. At last he surrendered. That is, he said meekly, “ What will the ladies give ? ”

The moment he said that we knew the day was ours. Now came my hour of success. I glibly said my lesson, “ Forty francs a day. No more ! ”

A voluble reply ten minutes long, with heart-rending gestures.

“ I do not understand Italian. Forty francs a day. No more.”

Fifteen minutes more of volubility, appealing grimace, and gesture.

“ I do not understand one word ! Forty francs a day. No more ! ”

Our man fell. He would go for forty francs a day, this father of a family who had assured us with streaming eyes that his children would die of hunger if he went for less than sixty !

Once having accepted our terms, he was abjectly our servant.

“ Show us your horses ! ” Meekly he led the way to his stables. With as knowing look as we could assume we scrutinized the lean black horse and dingy white horse which were walked up and down before us.

“ O, they can trot. Yes, yes, Signora ! ” and lashing them with the halter’s end he ran them up and down the hill at a good pace.

Triumphantly we led our conquered vassal back to the hotel ; the story of our victory was received incredulously by the friend whom we had left behind ; and who, speaking Italian as fluently as she speaks English, had vainly met the wordy extortioner on his own ground with his own weapons. The contract was signed ; supper and bed and night passed, and at seven o’clock next morning, sunniest of Saturdays, we were off. Giacomo, the driver, looked like a Barnstable fisherman : thin, wiry, light blue eyes, pale brown hair, and scanty red whiskers. “ O, how came you over here ? ” thought we as he jumped up and took the reins.

The whole country seemed on the broad laugh. So bright, so green were flower and leaf and field ; waving locust hedges, full of morning-glories ; and everywhere wide stretches of vineyards, in which the vines were looped across from tree to tree, looking like an array of one-legged dancers.

Lunch at Santa Croce, a town which has a lake, and beech - woods and glimpses of the far-off dolomite peaks. In the distance we could see a misty fringe of solid green, high up in the air. It was the top of the great beech forest, from which the Venice arsenal gets wood for its oars and masts and gun-carriages. Ninety miles in circuit is this government forest, full of game, and with an isolated plateau in its centre, where the keepers and officials live. This would not be of especial moment to know, except that it is said that Titian used to go there to learn how trees grow, and that he spent three months in this neighborhood drawing the background for his “ Flight into Egypt.”

After lunch 1 walked on in advance of the carriage. A man and woman who were working in a vineyard on the right sent their little baby to beg of me. I do not know why I remember that baby as I do no other child in all Italy. She was literally a baby, certainly not more than two years old ; she was beautiful, yet not more beautiful than scores of Italian babies; but she was shy as a wild thrush ; she absolutely could not take a step towards me if she looked at me. So she clasped her two little inches of hands tight over her eyes, and crept on, in the middle of the dusty road, more and more slowly, till at last she stood still, two yards off; then taking one sly peep at me through her fingers, she instantly shut them down again tighter than ever and stood there, kicking up little clouds of dust with her bare toes, the most irresistible blind beggar I ever saw.

It is of no consequence to anybody that the name of the town where we slept that night was Longarone. If only journeys could be told and the names of towns left out, how marvellously improved stories of travel would be. But whoever sleeps at Longarone will remember it always, the dark, frightened, poverty-stricken looking little town which huddles in such bare hollows of mountain and rock. The dismal inn, also, they will never forget: rooms so huge that lights cannot light them ; two stalking high beds in every bedroom ; and on the mouldy walls of the great dining-room ghastly pictures of Bible characters in giant size, — the Queen of Sheba leading up to Solomon, on his throne, a procession of black boys loaded down with pumpkin-shaped jewels ; Samson with his head in the lap of Delilah, who brandishes aloft at least two pounds of coarse black hair ; and Pharaoh’s daughter receiving Moses in a knife-tray, while his mother stands in full sight kneedeep in water on the opposite side of the river.

The Ampezzo road, just beyond Longarone, enters the country of Cadore, the country of Titian. No wonder they were strong in fight, the Cadorini, and loyal of soul. To be born in such mountain fastnesses, to climb such precipices, to breathe such air, and to see such flowers, at once, could not fail to make souls both strong and sweet.

A strange hopelessness almost holds me back from the attempt to speak of that day’s journey through the Ampezzo Pass : they who have not seen it will not believe ; they who have seen it will smile that one should try to put such shapes in words. Possibly geologists can tell what a dolomite mountain is ; how and why it is so seamed, so jagged, so wrought into castle and battlement and obelisk and cathedralfront; beautiful and terrible and graceful and grotesque ; by turns, all at once ; in sunlight, in shadow, at noon, at night ; shifting and changing tint with every breath of wind or cloud on its surfaces : but to common men’s eyes, these dolomite ranges are as unlike all other mountain forms as is Cellini’s carven work to market-place pottery.

They seem like supernatural architecture gleaming out of supernatural realms in upper air. There are spires and minarets and bell-towers and turrets and colonnades and wrought walls ; that they are ten, twelve, thirteen thousand feet away, that no human foot can scale them, no living earthly thing abide among them, only makes their distinct semblance of palace and church and city the more uncanny. And when, as often happens, a sudden wreath of cloud or fantastic growth of moss changes some scarred and lined rock into giant likeness of human face, it becomes still harder not to believe that they are tenanted by beings not of flesh and blood. One such face we saw, which never took its eye off us for miles. Even sharp turns in the road made no change in it, except to draw the gray hood of fir closer round its cheeks and to make it look more and more weird.

These startling and fantastic mountain shapes hedged us, walled us, seemed to marshal themselves to oppose us, all the way from Longarone to Tai Cadore. In spite of ourselves we were overawed. If the sun had not shone gayly and the peasants had not whistled and sung, I think we might have been afraid. But every little village was astir with work, and babies were everywhere ; we met low two-wheeled wagons filled with hay, slowly pulled along by donkeys, while the driver slept on his back ; wagons loaded heavily with beech and pine boards, and drawn by oxen which looked like gigantic maltese kittens with horns. The meadows were green with a greenness so shining that it seemed to blaze ; whole fields were solid mosaics of color, with red and blue and yellow and white flowers. Little chapels were perched up on apparently inaccessible heights, above every village. “ Why do they put the chapels so high up, Giacomo ? ” said I.

“ It must be very hard to climb to them.”

“Ah, Signora, the air is holier there,” replied the Barnstable fisherman.

At Perarollo, the river Boita, and the river Piave, and the huge dolomite Antelao, eleven thousand feet high, all join hands to close up the Ampezzo Pass. This is perhaps the most picturesque spot of the road. The rivers force the mountains back a little, and the sun pours in ; high up on all sides are small plateaus of green pasture ; the village is built into every niche of foothold it can find, and is full of pretty summer-houses of brown and yellow wood. On each river are lumber-mills, and the glistening logs are rolling and drifting down on both sides.

Three times this wonderful Ampezzo road winds across the front of the Antelao before it can venture to turn it; it seems to cling to the mountain’s side like an elastic ladder of stone, a perfect miracle of engineering. We were hours climbing slowly back and forth on that dolomite wall, tacking, like a ship in contrary winds. From the first tier of the road we looked up to the other two, hanging above our heads; from the upper, we looked down into Perarollo, and could see no trace of the road by which we had come.

At last we fairly rounded the mountain, and, turning back again into the valley of the Boita, saw the village of Tai Cadore shining before us. In an hour we had reached the little inn. But a guest had arrived before us, sudden, unannounced. His unwelcome presence filled every room. As Giacomo, with a ludicrous affectation of effort, reined in his only too willing horses, a man came running out of the house with significant gestures exclaiming, “ Do not stop, do not stop; the padrone lies dying.” He was the padrone’s son, and his eyes were red from crying. A crowd of peasants stood about the door and in the hall ; the little dingy windows of the room on the left hand of the door were darkened by heads rising one above the other, but all motionless. No doubt it was in that very room that the poor landlord lay, drawing his last breaths with unnecessary difficulty in the close air made still closer by such crowding in of friends and neighbors. I was struck by the oneness of the look which death’s presence brings on faces of simple-hearted, solitary people all the world over. These men of Cadore were earlier on the spot than it is the custom in Maine or New Hampshire for neighbors to gather ; but I have seen at many a New England funeral just such a silent, eager circle of men standing around the door through which the dead must be borne, and looking and listening with a weird sort of alert solemnity which seems not wholly sorry for the occasion.

It was a most opportune moment for us, however, which this good soul had selected for his dying. Nothing for the reluctant Giacomo and the nerveless horses to do but to take us a mile and a half off the route for dinner and rest, at Pieve di Cadore. Pieve di Cadore ! the very place we had had at heart ever since we left Venice, and which we had had many misgivings about being able to see, while Giacomo rested his horses at Tai. At Pieve di Cadore “ 11 divino Tiziano ” was born in 1477 ; at Pieve di Cadore he lived till he was ten years old ; to Pieve di Cadore he returned year after year, for love of his kindred, men, and mountains. There, after the death of his wife, in 1530, he took refuge with his three motherless little children; and during this visit he painted, on a banner for the village church, a picture of three little children giving flowers to a Madonna seated on a throne.

There, in 1560, he came again, old, but not bent, and bearing the titles of Count of the Empire and Knight of the Golden Spur.

There also he would have fled, in 1576, when the plague was sweeping Venice ; but, brave and strong to the last, he delayed going until an edict had been issued forbidding the departure of any citizen from Venice. So in Venice he died, ninety-nine years old, alone, forsaken even by his servants; and the pestilence which had taken his life thwarted his purpose even after his death, for none dared carry his body — as he had willed, and left order for its burial—to Pieve di Cadore.

They buried it in haste in the church of the Frari, in Venice, dropping into the grave the knightly insignia which the Emperor had given to the painter ; and for nearly half a century no stone marked the spot where the insignia lay turning to dust, and the dust lay turning into insignia of those mysterious things “which shall be.”

“No one ever goes to the inn at Pieve di Cadore,” said the displeased Giacomo, with a shrug.

“ Why then is it an inn?” said we with sharp logical retort, inwardly blessing the conjunction of our star with the dying landlord’s at Tai, and not caring whether we could dine or not, in an inn on a street where the little boy Tiziano Vecellio had played.

But the inn was an inn, and the dinner not so bad that I remember it. I shall never forget, though, how it was cooked ; in big iron pots, swung from derricks of cranes, above a big bonfire, built on a lug stone platform, raised up in a sort of bay-window chimney, filling one whole side of the kitchen ; benches to right of the bonfire, benches to left of the bonfire ; benches and bonfire all in the chimney bay-window ; and people sitting on the benches, I among them, with feet at the bonfire ; and all the while the great iron pots boiling and steaming and bobbing their covers, among and above our feet; the landlady reaching over and among our shoulders, and sticking in ladles and pokers here and there. If she had knocked off my hat, at any minute, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world ; merely taking off my cover and the beef’s at once, lest we should boil to pieces.

She told us with pride how a deaf and dumb English artist had stayed with her for two months, had walked all over the Cadore country, and had carried away a box full of most beautiful pictures which he had painted. “ Poor gentleman, there was not much else he could do, since he could neither speak nor hear.” “ He was the sweetest gentleman.” “ Never made any trouble.”

“ Lived on polenta chiefly.” “ All the children knew him and used to follow him when he went off to paint.” And so she ran on, adding adjective after adjective in the sweet Italian superlatives, which are so silver smooth in their endings that there seems far less of exaggeration in them than in the harsher measures of more and most in other tongues. It was plain that the poor lonely deaf-mute had won for himself warm place in the village heart. His speechless language was a universal one ; and perhaps, after all, he stood less helpless among the people than we did with our stammer of poor Italian.

After dinner we followed a thread of path down sharp terraces, and behind houses, into a meadow which one must cross to reach the ruins of the Castle of Cadore. The Castle was a castle so late as 1809. Now it is a ruin, and the ugly village church, they say, was built out of its stones. But it is far better as it is, — a great gateway tower, high battlements, several lengths of crumbling wall, and a high square tower in the middle. From its heights must be magnificent view of the valleys of the Piave and the Boita, and the grand mountain masses of dolomite in all directions. But we did not see this view ; we climbed no hill ; we asked for no castle ; we knelt in the meadow among the flowers. The path was so narrow that two could not pass, unless one stepped out; but to step out was like stepping into spicy sea. No foot could fall there without crushing more flowers than it would be easy to count, and the mere brushing by of garments stirred fragrance heavy like incense. We were speechless; we could not believe ; the mosaic fields of bloom we had seen on our way were dull and scanty. Then we said, “ O, no doubt the legend is true, that Titian, when he was only eleven years old, painted with juices of flowers a picture of the Madonna; this is the field where he picked the flowers ; and these are the same reds and blues and yellows which he used.” Up and down in the meadow we went, picking flowers in the sort of frantic haste with which in dreams or in fairy stories men snatch enchanted gold in caves or palaces of wizards. If the meadow had melted away of a sudden, and left us emptyhanded in a dusty place, I think it would have been less startling than it grew to be, to see each slope and hollow lying minute after minute unaltered, undiminished in color, while we filled our hands over and over again with flowers whose shapes and whose tints were all new to us. By the reckoning of clocks we were not in that meadow more than twenty minutes ; but we carried out of it thirty-two different kinds of flowers which no one of us had ever seen before. Besides these there were dozens more, which we did not pick, because we knew them, — clovers, and gentians, and ladies’-tresses, and buttercups, and columbines, and bellworts,and meadowrue, and shepherd’s-purse. We never saw such spot again. It is part of my creed that there is no other such spot in the world, and I call it Titian’s Meadow.

It is but a few moments’ walk from this meadow to the house where he was born. It is a poor little cottage, low and black and smoky ; an old woman, who looked as if she might be a hundred or a thousand years old, was hobbling and mumbling about in the kitchen, over just such a stone platform of cooking-stove as we had left in the inn. She was used to receiving visitors in the name of Titian, and had a glib string of improbable story at her tongue’s end. The huge rafters overhead were burned and smoked into blacks and yellows and browns, which were stronger witness to centuries than any words could give; and an old stone fountain in front of the house, presided over by a nameless, featureless stone saint, plashed away into an eight-sided stone basin ; a very dirty little boy was sailing a chip in it ; probably he looked not unlike another little boy who sailed chips in it four hundred years ago, and whose name now gives honor to the cottage walls in this inscription: “ Within these humble walls Tiziano Vecelli began his celebrated life.”

Titian is more honored by this inscription than by the full-length painting of him, which stretches up and down on the bell-tower of the Pretura. Anything uglier than the Pretura is seldom seen, and the ambitious Cadorini have made bad matters worse by stuccoing the building from top to bottom and painting it in imitation of old stone. But they carefully refrained from disturbing the picture of Titian, and there it still stands in giant hideousness ; a man apparently twelve feet high, and weighing five or six hundred, swathed from neck to ankles in a stiff robe of bright blue, which has so little semblance of fold or fulness that it looks less like a robe than like a huge blue sarcophagus into which the unhappy painter had sunk up to his ears ; his left hand points to the “ Casa Tiziano ” ; and at his side, on a table covered with a flagrantly gaudy cloth, lie his palette and brushes ; behind the whole, a straight wall of sky, ten shades bluer than the blue robe, and if possible more unnatural. The continued existence of this picture is proof that spirits do not revisit this earth; or at any rate cannot make use of physical machinery to accomplish material ends in this atmosphere. Wherever Titian is to-day, he has not forgotten his beloved Cadore, and he would not let this colossal abomination look down into that piazza another night, if he could help himself.

From the Pretura to the church through the Sunday crowds of smiling people ; women with short, dark blue gowns and white or gay handkerchiefs tied in the Albanian fashion over their heads ; men with higher hats, symptom of the nearing Tyrol ; children rosy and fat and merry, — comforting contrast to the pallid little ones of Venice. No soul, old or young, but looked at us with straight, curious, friendly gaze ; they are off the common routes of travel, the Cadorini, and are all the friendlier and nicer for it. The old sexton knew very well, however, as soon as we crossed the threshold of the church, what we would see ; and it was with great pride that he drew the curtain from the group of family portraits under name of Madonna and Saints, which hangs in the chapel of the Vecellio family, and which Titian painted.

There seems odd mixture of reverence for earth and irreverence for heaven in the way the masters painted portraits of wives and nephews for Madonnas and Saints. In this picture, “ San Tiziano ” the patron saint of the Vecelli kneels on the right hand of the Madonna. He is, however, only Titian’s nephew Marco, and the Madonna is Titian’s wife ; while Titian’s uncle Francesco figures, by help of a cross on his shoulder, as St. Andrew, and in one corner Titian himself appears as a sober acolyte. A more comfortable and domestic-looking family group was never photographed under name of Smith or Jones. Except that the little baby curled up in the mother’s lap is naked, there seems nothing unnatural (or supernatural) about their all happening to be there together just at that minute.

There is another of Titian’s pictures here, said to have been painted when he was only twenty years old. This also is of a Madonna and Saints ; there were a few other pictures which the sexton pressed us to see, a Pordenone, he said, and a Palma Veccldo ; but we liked the open air of the market-place and the sight of the mountains better. Stands and wagons of fruit and silk handkerchiefs and chickens and earthen pipkins filled the corners. Cadore is a rough country, and gives small reward to them that farm it, but it has always been famous for fruits. Even in the thirteenth century there came to be a proverb,

The clouds began to gather and wheel among the crags of the dolomite mountains. They were ten thousand feet up in air, to be sure, and miles away to north and west and south ; but they meant rain, — rain close upon us, violent, pelting, driving rain. These were such sudden gatherings and massings of clouds as Titian had watched and studied and carried away in memory, and reproduced, when, living on the serene, soft, gliding level of Venice, he threw into so many of his pictures marvellous backgrounds of sharp, abrupt mountain outlines with clouds circling round their summits. Doubtless Venetian critics who had not been in Cadore found these mountain backgrounds unnatural and impossible. Certainly a faithful drawing of the weird and fantastic dolomites would seem simply grotesque caricature to one who had never seen them. Even a photograph would seem incredible.

The peaks of Marmarolo and Duranno disappeared ; great sheets of mist came driving down, blotting out even the castle ; blotting out also every trace of content and good-humor upon Giacomo’s face. This small addition to his prescribed route had been too much for his philosophy, and our delays had finally piled the last feather on the camel’s back of his patience. Perhaps, however, we were unjust ; perhaps he knew even better than we did the feebleness of the spectral horses which drew us slowly out of Pieve di Cadore in that streaming rain ; it was an uncanny atmosphere ; all shapes seemed lost; and then, again, all shapes seemed to loom and quiver and dance ; the black horse looked white, and the white horse did not seem to be there, though we heard his languid footfalls.

“ Shut up the carriage, Giacomo,” said we. “ It is of no use to keep it open in such a blinding storm.”

Quickly and silently he roofed us over with the ill-smelling leather flap ; and as silent as he, and, almost as sullenly, — shall I confess ? — we took that stifling afternoon’s journey to Cortina d’ Ampezzo. We seemed driving in the teeth of sudden winter ; the rain changed to sleet and the wind howled ; the jagged peaks of dolomite thrust themselves here and there out of the clouds as if they were being hurled at us by invisible giants. It was nearly eight o’clock when we drove into the little piazza of Cortina d’ Ampezzo. Suddenly we halt. In the stormy twilight a woman has run across the road, and almost taken our horses by the head. “ Are these the American ladies ? Then they are to come to our inn. Their friends are awaiting them there.”

This was one of the sisters Barbaria, who keep the “ House of the Star of Gold ” ; and lest by any ill chance we might go to the rival inn, she had been watching the Cadore road all the afternoon.

O, how beamed the pleasant English faces which smiled our welcome in that low doorway ! and how crackled the fire in the kitchen where two sisters Barbaria, with high-crowned black hats on their heads, were washing dishes ; one sister Barbaria was picking feathers off tiny birds ; another sister Barbaria was piling up our bags and bundles on her brawny arms ; another sister Barbaria was asking what we would have for supper ; and a fifth sister Barbaria was standing in the hall looking on : five sisters Barbaria ! and they have kept the “ Albergo Stella d’ Oro ” for many years, without any help from man.

Presently appeared a sixth sister Barbaria, but she was a fine lady of quite other style. She was Barbaria no longer, having married a young German engineer, a clever fellow who had had charge of that part of the Ampezzo road between Cortina d’ Ampezzo and Cadore ; and, staying at the “ Star of Gold,” had found a wife among his landladies. This sister wore a silk gown and a show of jewelry, had been with her husband to Rome and Venice, and was now summering at Cortina, like any other lady of means. But she was far less interesting than her guileless sisters, who had never been out of the village in which they were born, and who shared all the work of the inn, even the hardest and most menial, with a sisterly good-will and good-cheer which were beautiful to see.

The two who wore black hats like common peasants, and who drudged all day in the low basement kitchen and outhouses, seemed as happy and loving as the others, who were much better dressed, and who cared for the rooms, waited at table, kept accounts, etc.

One of these was a woman who would have been an artist if she had not been an innkeeper and lived in Cortina. It was pathetic to see how this poor soul had found outlet for her artistic impulse in works of worsted and crochet cotton. The “best room ” of the “ Star of Gold ” was decorated with her handiwork, — full long curtains of knit lace at the windows and over the bed ; a counterpane of the same lace ; a full draping for the toilet-table ; and crocheted covers for all the chairs. The patterns were all singularly graceful and pretty. Lifting the chair covers, we found, to our astonishment, that the chair bottoms were all most elaborately worked in gay worsteds on cloth. Then we said to one of the sisters, “ How pretty these things are. Did you make them ? ”

Her plain old face lit up with pleasure. “ O no ; my sister Anita made them all. She does most beautiful work, sister Anita. She shall show you.” And, running out, she called Anita, who came shyly but with pleasure; poor, brown, withered, simple old maiden woman, whose one joy had been to fashion these gay flowers. She brought in her hand pieces of black and brown broadcloth, enough for half a dozen chairs and two crickets, most elaborately embroidered.

The patterns were stiff, and the colors not always good.

“ We have to take what we can get, here in this poor place,’ said sister Anita ; “ sometimes I think, if I could go myself to Brixen, I could surely find prettier patterns, but I must send always. Are there not prettier patterns ? ” she asked with pathetic eagerness. Could any human heart have been flinty enough not to equivocate in reply to this question of this poor hungry soul ? Then when she found that we were so interested in her work, and admired it so heartily, she darted away and returned presently with great wreaths and bunches of worsted flowers, — lilies and poppies and gentians and pinks, and long ivy vines, made upon wires, and really beautiful. These were to decorate the house with on festa day ; she had many drawers full of them ; had enough to decorate the whole house, “ till it looked like garden ! ” And no one had ever taught her to make them ; she had picked the flowers in the field, she said, and set them up in a glass before her, and copied them as nearly as she could. “ Why do you not make up these chairs and crickets ? ” we thoughtlessly asked ; “ they are too pretty to be laid away in a drawer.”

Anita replied that she was too poor ; it would take much money. But Anita did not tell the truth. I saw in her cheek another story, written in red, as indeed it might well be,—the story which had in it a hope deferred, perhaps lost forever. Poor Anita, she is old and ugly. I am afraid the embroidered chairs will never grace a wedding-feast.

Next morning we looked out on snow; everywhere fine feathery dust of snow ; thin rims of ice in the stone fountain before the inn, and solid masses of white on the sides of the mountains. But the first hour of sun melted it all off the meadows, and left the flowers brighter than ever, glistening as after a heavy dew. Tiny white lilies not two inches long nor more than eight inches from the ground, and low gentians of a blue like the blue of lapis-lazuli,—these were growing everywhere ; we filled our hands with them within five minutes’ walk of the inn. Later in the day the German engineer brought in a bouquet which he had gathered farther up on the hills of such flowers as we had seen at Pieve di Cadore ; twenty-four different kinds in that bouquet, all colors, all shapes, all fragrances !

There is one shoemaker in Cortina d’Ampezzo. His shop is in an upper chamber, about eight feet square. There I found him sitting on a low seat, with a leathern apron, and spectacles way down his nose, holding a shoe wrong side up between his knees, and sewing away like any old man in Lynn. I sat down gravely in front of him, held out a morocco bow in one hand and a tattered American boot in the other, and asked if he could sew the bow on the boot. He was a German, but the apparition of my boot was too much for even his phlegm ; he turned it over and over and over. A boot that buttoned he had never seen ; I showed him my button-hook ; his amazement deepened ; he buttoned and unbuttoned the boot with it, grunting out thicker and thicker, “ Jas, jas,” at every turn of the instrument. Finally he set about the sewing on of the bow. The door opened ; more men of Cortina came in; they had seen me go up; they scented adventure ; one, two, three ; the room grew very hot ; the buttonhook was passed about ; the three men turned it up and down, and looked at me. I could not understand a dozen words they said. It was very embarrassing. The time came to put on my boot; the shoemaker leaned forward to see how I did it; the three men of Cortina crowded around and stooped down to see how I did it ; a sense of the ludicrous helplessness of my situation so overcame me that I broke out into a genuine laugh, which, improper as it might have been, seemed to put me quite at my ease again, and I displayed to the good souls the mechanism of button-hook, button, and button-hole as complacently as if I had been a vender of the patent. Then they all four accompanied me to the door, and bade me good morning with the reverence due to the owner of such mysterious boots. But I resolved not to take off my boots again in Tyrolese shoe-shops !

How bitterly we regretted the ignorant haste in which we had, at Conegliano, pledged ourselves to ask but one day’s rest at Cortina d’ Ampezzo. We would gladly have stayed with the sisters Barbaria a week ; we comforted ourselves by air castles of another summer in which we would come again and stay a month, bringing with us them whom we most loved. Hopefully the elder sister made it clear to us that she would welcome us as guests for a month, at seven francs a day. A month, face to face with those wonderful pink and yellow and gray and white and salmon-colored mountains of dolomite ! A month of those flowers ! Thirty times as many as we had picked that day ; and dear soft brown eyes which we knew, to light up with joy at sight of all we could bring ! What a dream it was ; on what shore does it stand now, pale in its death, but transfigured in its resurrection among other sweet things which we dare to call lost, when they have only gone before !

The dining-room windows of the “ Star of Gold ” are filled with geraniums ; not “ plants,” not “ bushes,” as we commonly see, but trees, — trees tall, branching, sturdy, and bearing flowers as apple - trees bear apples ; blossoms scarlet and rose-pink, and marvellous white with purple and crimson markings. Lavishly the elder sister gathers them for departing guests ; and we drove off in the early afternoon, each of us with a big bunch in our lap.

We were not yet at the summit of the Pass. Hours more of slow climbing among larches and pines and rocks and flowers ; at last the larches disappeared, then the pines ; nothing was left but stunted firs. On a dark icy plateau at the very top of the Pass we came suddenly upon a great field of blue forget-me-nots ; just beyond that, a silent lake which must be unfathomable, to look so black ; and then we began to go slowly down, down the other side ; soft wooded slopes, and valleys of grain, and a look of thrift. We felt almost like dodging, as if we were pelted with pebbles, when the German gutturals first began to fly in the air. We forgot the German for “ chicken,” and fell back on “ Kut-kut ka-da-kut,” which is language for “ chicken ” all the world over. We shuddered at sight of the huge effigies of the dead Christ, at corners of the roads ; we found the men surly, and women and men alike hideous, and hideously alike ; we no longer thought the horses too slow ; we grudged each mile that they took us farther from Italy. Each of us had left half her heart in Venice, and the other half in the “ House of the Star of Gold,” with the sisters Barbaria.

H. H.