Conspicuous among them all was Giulietta, her blue-black hair recently braided and polished to a glossy radiance, and all her costume arranged to show her comely proportions to the best advantage,—­her great pearl ear-rings shaking as she tossed her head, and showing the flash of the emerald in the middle of them.  An Italian peasant-woman may trust Providence for her gown, but ear-rings she attends to herself,—­for what is life without them?  The great pearl ear-rings of the Sorrento women are accumulated, pearl by pearl, as the price of years of labor.  Giulietta, however, had come into the world, so to speak, with a gold spoon in her mouth,—­since her grandmother, a thriving, stirring, energetic body, had got together a pair of ear-rings of unmatched size, which had descended as heirlooms to her, leaving her nothing to do but display them, which she did with the freest good-will.  At present she was busily occupied in coquetting with a tall and jauntily-dressed fellow, wearing a plumed hat and a red sash, who seemed to be mesmerized by the power of her charms, his large dark eyes following every movement, as she now talked with him gayly and freely, and now pretended errands to this and that and the other person on the bridge, stationing herself here and there, that she might have the pleasure of seeing herself followed.

“Giulietta,” at last said the young man, earnestly, when he found her accidentally standing alone by the parapet, “I must be going to-morrow.”

“Well, what is that to me?” said Giulietta, looking wickedly from under her eyelashes.

“Cruel girl! you know”——­

“Nonsense, Pietro!  I don’t know anything about you”; but as Giulietta said this, her great, soft, dark eyes looked out furtively, and said just the contrary.

“You will go with me?”

“Did I ever hear anything like it?  One can’t be civil to a fellow but he asks her to go to the world’s end.  Pray, how far is it to your dreadful old den?”

“Only two days’ journey, Giulietta.”

“Two days!”

“Yes, my life; and you shall ride.”

“Thank you, Sir,—­I wasn’t thinking of walking.  But seriously, Pietro, I am afraid it’s no place for an honest girl to be in.”

“There are lots of honest women there,—­all our men have wives; and our captain has put his eye on one, too, or I’m mistaken.”

“What! little Agnes?” said Giulietta.  “He will be bright that gets her.  That old dragon of a grandmother is as tight to her as her skin.”

“Our captain is used to helping himself,” said Pietro.  “We might carry them both off some night, and no one the wiser; but he seems to want to win the girl to come to him of her own accord.  At any rate, we are to be sent back to the mountains while he lingers a day or two more round here.”

“I declare, Pietro, I think you all little better than Turks or heathens, to talk in that way about carrying off women; and what if one should be sick and die among you?  What is to become of one’s soul, I wonder?”