On further conversation with my ciociari, I found that they came yearly from Sora, a town in the Abruzzi, about one hundred miles from Rome, making the journey on foot, and picking up by the way whatever trifle of copper they could.  In this manner they travelled the whole distance in five days, living upon onions, lettuce, oil, and black bread.  They were now singing the second novena for Natale, and, if one could judge from their manner and conversation, were quite content with what they had earned.  I invited them up into my room, and there in the pleasantest way they stunned us with the noise of both their instruments, to the great delight of the children and the astonishment of the servants, for whom these common things had worn out their charm by constant repetition.  At my request, they repeated the words of the novena they had been singing, and I took them down from their lips.  After eliminating the wonderful m-ms of the Neapolitan dialect, in which all the words lay imbedded like shells in the sand, and supplying some of the curious elisions with which those Abruzzi Procrusteans recklessly cut away the polysyllables, so as to bring them within the rythmic compass, they ran thus:—­

  “Verginella figlia di Sant’ Anna,
  Nella ventre portasti il buon Gesu. 
  Si parturisti sotto la capanna,
  E dov’ mangiav’no lo bue e 1’ asinello.

  “Quel Angelo gridava:  ’Venite, Santi! 
  ’Che andato Gesu dentro la capanna,
  Ma guardate Vergine beata,
  Che in ciel in terra sia nostr’ avvocata!

  “San Giuseppe andava in compagnia,
  Si trovo al partorir di Maria. 
  La notte di natale e notte santa—­
  Lo Padre e 1’ Figliolo e lo Spirito Santo. 
  ’Sta la ragione che abbiamo cantato;
  Sia a Gesu bambino rappresentata.”

The sudden introduction of “Quel Angelo” in this song reminds us of a similar felicity in the romantic ballad of “Lord Bateman,” where we are surprised to learn that “this Turk,” to whom no allusion had been previously made, “has one lovely daughter.”

The air to which this is sung is very simple and sweet, though monotonous.  Between the verses and at the close, a curious little ritornello is played.

The wanderings of the pifferari are by no means confined to the Roman States.  Sometimes they stray “as far away as Paris is,” and, wandering about in that gay capital, like children at a fair, play in the streets for chance sous, or stand as models to artists, who, having once been to Rome, hear with a longing Rome-sickness the old characteristic sounds of the piffero and zampogna.  Two of them I remember to have heard thus, as I was at work in my studio in Paris; and so vividly did they recall the old Roman time, that I called them in for a chat.