We will betake ourselves thither about midnight, as I have said.  It is a bitterly cold night, and the stars are shining brilliantly in the clear, steely-looking sky—­such a night as Rome has still occasionally at this time of year, and as she used to have more frequently when Horace spoke of incautious early risers getting nipped by the cold.  One of the first things that strikes us as we make our way to the place of general rendezvous muffled in our thickest and heaviest cloaks and shawls is the apparent insensibility of this people to the cold.  One would have expected it to be just the reverse.  But whether it be that their organisms have stored up such a quantity of sunshine during the summer as enables them to defy the winter’s cold, or whether their Southern blood runs more rapidly in their veins, it is certain that men, women and children—­and especially the women—­will for amusement’s sake expose themselves to a degree of cold and inclement weather that a Northerner would shrink from.

For some days previously, in preparation for the annual revel, a series of temporary booths have by special permission of the municipality been erected around the piazza.  In these will be sold every kind of children’s toys—­of the more ordinary sorts, that is to say; for Roman children have never yet been rendered fastidious in this respect by the artistic inventions that have been provided for more civilized but perhaps not happier childhood.  There will also be a store of masks, colored dominoes, harlequins’ dresses, monstrous and outrageous pasteboard noses, and, especially and above all, every kind of contrivance for making a noise.  In this latter kind the peculiar and characteristic specialty of the day are straight tin trumpets some four or five feet in length.  These are in universal request among young and old; and the general preference for them is justified by the peculiarly painful character of the note which they produce.  It is a very loud and vibrating sound of the harshest possible quality.  One feels when hearing it as if the French phrase of “skinning the ears” were not a metaphorical but a literal description of the result of listening to the sound.  And when hundreds of blowers of these are wandering about the streets in all parts of the town, but especially in the neighborhood of the Piazza Navona, making night hideous with their braying, it may be imagined that those who go to their beds instead of doing homage to the Befana have not a very good time of it there.

It is a curious thing that the Italians, who are denizens of “the land of song,” should take especial delight in mere abundance of discordant noise.  Yet such is unquestionably the case.  They are in their festive hours the most noisy people on earth.  And the farther southward you go the more pronounced and marked is the propensity.  You may hear boys and men imitating the most inharmonious and vociferous street-cries solely for the purpose of exercising