Smiles: A Medley

— Miss Agnes Repplier is very judicious in her choice of authors for the dozy hours ; but how about those dozy minutes after the light is out ? I confess, I always like to keep some sunny memory or flattering thought to usher me agreeably into the land of dreams. The other night I cajoled myself to slumber by luxuriously collecting a variety of smiles.

The idea was suggested by the vivid recollection of the beaming, friendly face of a little girl who had shown me downstairs, and then stood hugging her cat close, under the projecting eaves of Albrecht Dürer’s house. It was not the fee smile, which often makes the tourist feel as though everything in life had to be paid for, but a genuine shining out of childish good will, which followed me all the way down the steep street, and will be a bright memory when many a museum and monument have faded out of mind.

Side by side with the little Nuremberger rose the vision of Mona Lisa’s mysterious countenance with its enigmatic smile, — a face as real as the living German lassie’s, renewing the old perplexity whether or no Leonardo’s lady be really gioconda. Then, like a bar of music between the pictures came that beautiful old Italian phrase, “ il lampeggiar dell’ angelico riso,” summoning forth sweet flashes seen in soft southern eyes, and recalling a little episode of the Sicilian coast. I had been trying (oh, foolish mortal!) to read, sitting out on the cactus heights of Taormina. Vying with the turquoise sea and snow-clad Etna to divert my attention was a small urchin who vainly sought to make me purchase a bouquet of wild flowers. Failing, he walked off, and presently reappeared bearing a bunch of prickly withered thistles, which he held out to me with a phrase of fine Italian adaptation to foreign requirements. “ They are antiques,” he said. I looked up, and the mischievous merriment brimming over in his dark eyes is something delicious to remember. “ How ancient ? ” queried I. “ Oh, two or three centuries,” replied my merchant. But that smile bad made us friends ; he ceased to speculate on my purse, and after that gave me a beam of good fellowship whenever we met. He was a cheerful pendant to a small maid at the same place, who, after describing in quaint, infantile dialect the bed I was going to sleep on, would point dramatically to the stony ground at our feet, and murmur with a most artistically pathetic intonation, “ Io mi cuco ki.”

Other smiles came trooping up : there were German and Austrian ones, French, English, and Russian, all speaking one sweet, common speech, breaking the ice between strangers, softening hard moments, mollifying stern or angry folk. There were brave smiles shining through tears, children smiles of happy trust, and mother smiles too tender to be told. In the interstices of my recollections gleamed welcoming smiles under white caps, giving the weary traveler a certain sense of home even in big, impossible caravansaries. Surely the successful manager should keep only smiling maids and waiters. Under the influence of an indulgent smile, I have actually forgotten the funereal solemnity of ordering a steak from gentlemen so sombrely clad. But in my musings all smiles paled, for sheer illuminating quality, before those of the negroes. The waiters at the White Sulphur Springs gleamed forth whitejacketed, embodied smiles, and by the side of these rose that delighted grin with which my Virginia cook met all guests, and often put to shame my own more tardy, delinquent sense of hospitality.

Is it not partly in her capacity for ready, sympathetic smiles, the shining out of sweet kindliness and quick perceptions, that the gracious American girl creates a friendly atmosphere about herself, and outshines her sober or timid English sister in winning hearts ?

Still the queerly assorted procession of smiles thronged before my mind’s eye. The cat from Wonderland came, and Mephistopheles, and the little chimney sweep whose smile was as when

As the minutes flew, a glad company of poet loves clustered about my bed. “ Sweetly smiling Lalage ” and “ Hebe in wreathèd smiles ” led Cherry Ripe and dainty Hester from whose

I think madcap Beatrix and arch Rosalind were there, and certainly the Highland girl brought a