Wonderful was their speech.  In the few months of their wandering, they had put into their Neapolitan dough various plums of French words, which, pronounced in their odd way, “suffered a change into something peculiarly rich and strange.”  One of them told me that his wife had just written to him by the hand of a scrivano, lamenting his absence, and praying him to send her his portrait.  He had accordingly sent her a photograph in half-length.  Some time afterwards she acknowledged the receipt of it, but indignantly remonstrated with him for sending her a picture “che pareva guardando per la fenestra” (which seemed to be looking out of the window,) as she oddly characterized a half-length, and praying to have his legs also in the next portrait.  This same fellow, with his dull, amiable face, played the role of a ferocious wounded brigand dragged into concealment by his wife, in the studio of a friend next door; but, despite the savagery and danger of his counterfeited position, he was sure to be overpowered by sleep before he had been in it more than five minutes,—­and if the artist’s eye left him for a moment, he never failed to change his attitude for one more fitted to his own somnolent propensities than for the picture.

The pifferari are by no means the only street-musicians in Rome, though they take the city by storm at Christmas.  Every day under my window comes a band of four or five, who play airs and concerted pieces from the operas,—­and a precious work they make of it sometimes!  Not only do the instruments go very badly together, but the parts they play are not arranged for them.  A violone grunts out a low accompaniment to a vinegar-sharp violin which saws out the air, while a trumpet blares in at intervals to endeavor to unite the two, and a flute does what it can, but not what it would.  Sometimes, instead of a violone, a hoarse trombone, with a violent cold in the head, snorts out the bass impatiently, gets ludicrously uncontrollable and boastful at times, and is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the cadenzas to finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its own noisy vociferation.  The harmonic arrangements are very odd.  Each instrument seems to consider itself ill-treated when reduced to an accompaniment or bass, and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted for it, to get possession of the air,—­the melody being, for all Italians, the principal object.  The violin, however, weak of voice as it is, always carries the day, and the other instruments steal discontentedly back to their secondary places, the snuffy old violone keeping up a constant growl at its ill luck, and the trombone now and then leaping out like a tiger on its prey.