and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing their novena, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint.  Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and, worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the shops and regular models offer a poor substitute.  It is the old story again.  The new and clean is not so paintable, not so picturesque, as the tarnished and soiled.  The worn blue of the cloak is softened by the dull gray of the threads beneath,—­patches of various colors are often let into the jacket or breeches,—­the hat is lustreless from age, and rusty as an old wall,—­and the first vivid red of the waistcoat is toned by constant use to a purely pictorial hue.  Besides, the true pifferaro wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by him,—­so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything.  From the sandals and corded leggings, which, in the Neapolitan dialect, are termed cioce, the pifferari are often called ciociari.

Their Christmas pilgrimages are by no means prompted by purely religious motives, though, undoubtedly, such considerations have some weight with them, the common peasantry being a religiously inclined people, and often making pilgrimages simply from a sense of duty and propriety.  But in these wanderings to Rome, their principal object is to earn a little money to support them during the winter months, when their “occupation is gone.”  As they are hired in Rome by the owners of the various houses adorned with a Madonna-shrine (of which there are over fifteen hundred in the city) to play before them at the rate of a paul or so for each full novena, and as they can easily play before thirty or forty a day, they often return, if their luck is good, with a tolerable little sum in their pockets.  Besides this, they often stand as models, if they are good-looking fellows, and thus add to their store; and then again, the forestieri (for, as the ancient Romans called strangers barbari, so their descendants call them foresters, wood-men, wild-men) occasionally drop baiocchi and pauls into their hats, still further to increase it.

Sometimes it is a father and son who play together, but oftener two old friends who make the pilgrimage in pairs.  This morning, as I was going out for a walk round the walls, two admirable specimens of the pifferari were performing the novena before a shrine at the corner of the street.  The player of the zampogna was an old man, with a sad, but very amiable face, who droned out the bass and treble in a most earnest and deprecatory manner.  He looked as if he had stood still, tending his sheep, nearly all his life, until the peace and quiet of Nature had sunk into his being, or, if you will, until