Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/152

The Villa della Madonna on the Eastern Wall

entered into a war of words with the signorina over a table-cover, from the centre of which Italy's martyred king glowered most reprovingly. The crowd rocked with laughter at the jests of the auctioneer, the girls hugged up to their sweethearts, even husbands laid protecting hands upon the shoulders of their wives and bought largely, while the children, mindful of the necessity of well-curbed emotion, made flying trips to the far corners of the square to emit whoops of pent-up energy. The donkey-carts drew up to enjoy the fray, and a herd of belated goats came in from the point of the iron, and stood like foolish carven images, while the little herdsman lingered on the outskirts. The light was acetylene, but the scene that it illumined was of the days of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, when spite-towers were the fashion, and the spite-fence was as foreign as the land from which it rises. By eleven, the square was left to the black shadows and the white moon, and silent save for the notes of the flutist who played in the palace of the Ardinghelli. Lucia he gave us that night, Rigoletto, and the song of Il Trovatore to Leonora, rightly enough from the "donjon-tower."