At Christmas, all the Roman world which has a baiocco in its pocket eats torone and pan giallo. The shops of the pastry-cooks and confectioners are filled with them, mountains of them incumber the counters, and for days before Christmas crowds of purchasers throng to buy them. Torone is a sort of hard candy, made of honey and almonds, and crusted over with crystallized sugar; or in other words, it is a nuga with a sweet frieze coat;—­but nuga is a trifle to it for consistency. Pan giallo is perhaps so called quasi lucus, it being neither bread nor yellow.  I know no way of giving a clearer notion of it than by saying that its father is almond-candy and its mother a plum-pudding.  It partakes of the qualities of both its parents.  From its mother it inherits plums and citron, while its father bestows upon it almonds and consistency.  In hardness of character it is half-way between the two,—­having neither the maternal tenderness on the one hand, nor the paternal stoniness on the other.  One does not break one’s teeth on it as over the torone, which is only to be cajoled into masticability by prolonged suction, and often not then; but the teeth sink into it as the wagoner’s wheels into clayey mire, and every now and then receive a shock, as from sunken rocks, from the raisin-stones, indurated almonds, pistachio-nuts, and pine-seeds, which startle the ignorant and innocent eater with frightful doubts.  I carried away one tooth this year over my first piece; but it was a tooth which had been considerably indebted to California, and I have forgiven the pan giallo. My friend the Conte Cignale, who partook at the same time of torone, having incautiously put a large lump into his mouth, found himself compromised thereby to such an extent as to be at once reduced to silence and retirement behind his pocket-handkerchief.  An unfortunate jest, however, reduced him to extremities, and, after a vehement struggle for politeness, he was forced to open the window and give his torone to the pavement—­and the little boys, perhaps. Chi sa? But, despite these dangers and difficulties, all the world at Rome eats pan giallo and torone at Christmas,—­and a Christmas without them would be an egg without salt.  They are at once a penance and a pleasure.  Not content with the pan giallo, the Romans also import the pan forte di Siena, which is a blood cousin of the former, and suffers almost nothing from time and age.

On Christmas and New Year’s day all the servants of your friends present themselves at your door to wish you a "buona festa," or a "buon capo d’anno." This generous expression of good feeling is, however, expected to be responded to by a more substantial expression on your part, in the shape of four or five pauls, so that one peculiarly feels the value of a large visiting-list of acquaintances at this season.  To such an extent is this practice