to order.  There was, therefore, a great bustle below stairs; and I could hear plainly that all my guests were lending their making, or their marring, hands to the preparation of the supper.  That the company should cook their own food on the way to the dining-room, seemed a quite novel arrangement, but one that promised well for their contentment with the banquet.  Nobody could be dissatisfied with what was everybody’s affair.

When seven o’clock struck, Eustace and I, who had been entertaining the children in their mothers’ absence, heard the sound of steps upon the stairs.  The guests arrived, bringing their own risotto with them.  Welcome was short, if hearty.  We sat down in carefully appointed order, and fell into such conversation as the quarter of San Vio and our several interests supplied.  From time to time one of the matrons left the table and descended to the kitchen, when a finishing stroke was needed for roast pullet or stewed veal.  The excuses they made their host for supposed failure in the dishes, lent a certain grace and comic charm to the commonplace of festivity.  The entertainment was theirs as much as mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took the form by degrees of curiously complicated hospitality.  I do not think a well-ordered supper at any trattoria, such as at first suggested itself to my imagination, would have given any of us an equal pleasure or an equal sense of freedom.  The three children had become the guests of the whole party.  Little Attilio, propped upon an air-cushion, which puzzled him exceedingly, ate through his supper and drank his wine with solid satisfaction, opening the large brown eyes beneath those tufts of clustering fair hair which promise much beauty for him in his manhood.  Francesco’s boy, who is older and begins to know the world, sat with a semi-suppressed grin upon his face, as though the humour of the situation was not wholly hidden from him.  Little Teresa, too, was happy, except when her mother, a severe Pomona, with enormous earrings and splendid fazzoletto of crimson and orange dyes, pounced down upon her for some supposed infraction of good manners—­creanza, as they vividly express it here.  Only Luigi looked a trifle bored.  But Luigi has been a soldier, and has now attained the supercilious superiority of young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in the piazza and knows the merits of the different cafes.  The great business of the evening began when the eating was over, and the decanters filled with new wine of Mirano circulated freely.  The four best singers of the party drew together; and the rest prepared themselves to make suggestions, hum tunes, and join with fitful effect in choruses.  Antonio, who is a powerful young fellow, with bronzed cheeks and a perfect tempest of coal-black hair in flakes upon his forehead, has a most extraordinary soprano—­sound as a bell, strong as a trumpet, well trained, and true to the least shade in intonation.  Piero,