Catiline's Namesake

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

Catiline’s HUDDLED together like sheep Namesake. in a windstorm are the houses of a certain little hamlet high in the Apennines, but the corridor-like streets are so clean one could eat one’s macaroni on the pavement. The ancient town hall is crusted over with the armorial bearings of scores of mountain captains ; a stone lion sits on a tall column before the fountain ; and corniced windows and porticoes point to a venerable history. This mountain eyrie claims the old Roman conspirator as its godfather ; and though the name has been strangely twisted, we will shut our eyes to improbability, hold fast to Charles Merivale’s assertion that among these heights Catiline was hunted to his death, and believe a tradition which confers a certain hoary, wicked dignity on a very innocent, peaceful spot.

A little apart, as if withdrawing for devotional quiet, is the church, belted by towering Norway pines ; and adjoining it is the convent, now emptied of its former inhabitants, and occupied by the public school and by the young doctor, who grows medicinal herbs, and cultivates currants and cherries in the garden for his bachelor preserving. His horse grazes quietly on the grassy plot beneath the church loggia. But once a year the place is resonant with gayety, when a merry-go-round is set up on the green, the enterprising manager blows lustily on a big trumpet, and all rich possessors of one sou come to ride on the prancing steeds and in the small chariots, while moneyless small folk gaze with envious eyes at the supreme bliss of their proud neighbors.

In one well-swept, sunny court is a dame school of tots, too wee for even an Italian communal school. In the midst presides a lovely dark-eyed old peasant woman, with a courteous, dignified bearing which a senator’s wife might envy. Around her, on low stools and all varieties of diminutive chairs, sit the small students, black haired and brown, boys and girls alike pursuing the arts of knitting and A B C, and that most difficult art, the art of keeping still. When the evening shadows lengthen, the school-mistress takes a baby charge in her arms, and, with many little folk clinging to her blue cotton skirt, she warily leads her pigmy procession down the precipitous alleys to their several homes. Of course on colder days the blue sky is exchanged for the smoky vaulting of a friendly kitchen, and then the noise grows quite deafening, and the gentle mistress shows a weary brow when her task is over. I carried on flirtations in barley sugar and chocolate drops with several chubby seekers after knowledge, but one day, unintentionally, became a general benefactress. I was preparing brandy cherries, and, having heard that it is a good plan to sun them, I stepped out on my stone balcony, perched high in air above the entrance of the infant academy, to try the receipt on a mammoth jar of fruit. There was some defect in the glass, and as I set it on the stone slab the jar shivered into fragments ; cherries and brandy rained down below. A shout arose on the strongly scented air.

“ Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering, And, like fowls in the farmyard when barley is scattering, Out came the children running.”

The dame school had discovered the novel hail from heaven, and feasted so gayly that certainly my sweet pickles could not have been more genuinely appreciated anywhere.

Life is hard and food scarce up here in the hills, but it is a feast time for young and old when a certain couple from the Pistoian plains passes through the village. An old man and a pannier-laden donkey arrive on Fridays, and are soon surrounded by people with outstretched hands and earthenware dishes, to whom the gray-haired vender dispenses luscious syrupy figs, at the rate of twenty for one cent. Children sit in the doorways, quite sticky and happy with the unusual plenty, and, peeping through barred windows, one sees a genre picture after the heart of Teniers : a smoke-stained kitchen, where the ruddy flames of a brushwood fire leap up the wide-mouthed chimney ; a table spread with the creamy, never-failing linen cloth of the Italian peasant, set out with flat dishes of pink ham and colossal piles of green and purple figs, illumined by the soft, confined light of the tall brass Tuscan lamp ; and, near the fireplace, an olive-skinned woman, whose gold-hooped earrings flash under her black braids, pouring out yellow-meal porridge for the supper, which to-night is a rare one.

In the summer time the place leads its gay existence. Families from the cities come here to spend July and August, and the narrow ways daily see gay parties starting out on picnics and mountain climbs. The pet trade of shoemaking is busily plied by the men ; the women wash and sew lor the strangers ; and the children spend their days gathering raspberries and strawberries on tangled, overgrown hillsides, and picking silver thistles and a feathery grass called “mountain mist” for sale to romantic old ladies.

The hall of the municipality, on whose walls a gaudy Vietor Emmanuel gazes across at a no less ruffianly Garibaldi, and both are leered at by chromo young women in pink satin, with their forefingers vulgarly thrust in their eyes, is turned into a ballroom, and sometimes into a concert hall. An itinerant prestidigitator presses a roundeyed, wonderstriick little native into service as slavey, and eats up handkerchiefs, swallows fire, and grows roses, in the old miraculous fashion. Once a week, a band, resplendent in blue and yellow, plays in the square, and a card swung on the cafe door announces in red chalk that frozen raspberry water is sold within at three cents a portion. On Sunday, the piazzetta under the pines is full of summer boarders, who gather there to chat and watch the peasants in their festal glory of bright cottons and gay kerchiefs.

But the storms and winds of the autumn change the aspect of this nook. Carriage after carriage departs down the winding road ; the English baker from Florence takes his leave ; the men go off to work in the Maremme and the silver mines of Sardinia ; the women shut themselves up with their little ones in the dark, cramped houses, to struggle through the bitter winter on a fare of heavy chestnut cakes, cornmeal mush, and coarse cheese ; the shepherds lead their flocks down to warmer, more sheltered valleys, and at night one is waked by strangely musical bells, whose peals, and then faintly echoing tinkles, reverberate long after in visions of sheep and bleating lambs hurrying down the passes of misty mountains, majestic in still, cold moonlight.