’4
T1115 PALACE OF THE LEA THERSTONEPA UGHS.
an Italian winter, and that adorn every Roman balcony, one could see into the penetralia ofa dozen Roman families and wrest thence the most vital secrets—even to how much Ro/mum Alfredo drank at dinner or whether lemon -juice or sour |
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UULY,
before the elder Bruins had time to squelch him. The studio-salon of the Leatherstone paughs amid the clouds and chimneys of the Eternal City was a chapter for the curious. It was as spacious as a country meeting-house, as lofty as befits a palace. It was frescoed like some of the modern pseudo-Gothic and pine cathedrals that adorn the village-greens of New Eng land hamlets, and its pol-pourri of ar tistic ideas was rich in helmeted Miner vas, vine - wreathed Bacchuses, winged
A CASE OF NON-REllI'l'TAl'(,'E.
wine gave piquancy to Rosina's salad. Entirely unacquainted with these de scendants of ancient patrician or pleb, the Leatherstonepaughs ventilated orig inal and individual theories concerning them, and gave them names of their own choosing. "Rameses the Great has quarrelled with the Sphinx and is flirting with the Pyramid," whispered young Cain one day as some of the family, leaning over the iron railing, looked into the leafy, azure-domed vault below, and saw into
the dining-room of a family whose mysteriousness of habit and un-Italian blankness of face gave them a fanciful resemblance to the eternal riddles of the Orient. The "Pyramid," whose wide feet and tiny head gave her her triangular title, was evidently a teacher, for she so often carried exercise-books and dog-eared grammars in her hand. She chanced at that moment to glance upward. "Lu cia," she cried to the Sphinx, speaking with an Italian accent that she flattered herself was to the down-gazers an un known tongue, "do look up to the fifth logg1'a. If there isn't the Huge Bear, the Middle-sized Bear and the Wee Bear looking as if they wanted to come down and eat us up!" " Y' ain't fat 'nuf," yelled the Wee Bear
Apollos and nameless classic nymphs. all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at homeness as Olympian heroes would feel .amid the mystic shades of the Scandi navian Walhalla. This room was mag nificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-em broidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream of plum pudding after a nightmare of mince-pie. Through this magnificence had drifted, while yet the Leatherstonepaughs saw Rome in all its idealizing mists, genera tions of artists. Sometimes these artists had had a sublime disdain of base lucre,
and sometimes base lucre had had a sub lime disdain of them. Some of the latter class—whose name is Legion—had mark ed their passage by busts, statuettes and paintings that served to remind Signora Anina, their landlady, that promises ofa
remittance can be as fair and false as the song of the Sirens or the guile of the Lore ley. Crusaders in armor brandished their lances there in evidence that Michael An gelo Bivins never sent from Manhattan the bit of white paper to redeem them. Antignone—usually wearing a Leather stonepaugh bonnet—mourned that Prax iteles Periwinkle faded out of the vistas of Rome to the banks of the Thames with out her. Dancing Floras seemed joy ous that they had not gone wandering among the Theban Colossi with Zefferi no, instead of staying to pay for his Ro man lodging; while the walls smiled, wept, simpered, threatened and gloom ed with Madonnas, Dolorosas, Beatrices, sprites, angels and fiends, the authors of
whose being had long ago drifted away on
