“Eh—­oh—­just a Giocho di Bocca,” she returned vaguely, “a game of bowls—­how should I know?”

Beyond the bowling alley is a long, narrow yard with bushes.  It would make quite a charming summer garden with little tables for after-dinner coffee.  But the Signora says that the Chiesa, there at the back of it, objects.  The Chiesa, I think, is the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.  Just why they don’t want the Signora to have tables in her own back yard is not clear.  She, being a Latin, shrugs her shoulders and makes no comment.  Standing in the darkness, there is a real freshness in the air; there is also a delicious, gurgling sound, the music of summer streams.

“How lovely!” you whisper.  “What a delightful, rippling sound.”

“Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel,” says La Signora sweetly.

There is, at Bertolotti’s one of the queerest little old figures in all that part of the world, the bent and aged Italian known universally as Castagna (Chestnuts), because of the interminable anecdotes he tells over and over again.  No one knows his real name, not even the Signor or the Signora.  Yet he has worked for them for years.  He wants no wages—­only a living and a home.  In the aforementioned back yard he has built himself a little house about the size of a dog kennel.  It is a real house, and like nothing so much as the historic residence of the Three Bears.  It has a window, eaves, weather-strips and a clothesline, for he does his own washing.  He trots off there very happily when his light work is done, and, when his door is closed, opens it for no one.  That scrap of a building is Castagna’s castle.  One evening I went to call on him, but he had put out his light.  In the gleam that came from the bowling alley behind me, something showed softly red and green and white against the wooden door.  I put out my hand and touched that world-famous cross.  It was about six inches long, and only of paper, but it was the flag of Italy, and it kept watch outside the Casa Castagna.  I am certain that he would not sleep well without it.

Probably the most famous Bohemian restaurant in the quarter is the Black Cat.  It is not really more typical than the others,—­indeed it is rather less so,—­but it is extremely striking, and most conspicuous.  There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised.  Just the same, it is fascinating.  From the moment you pass the outer, polite portals and intermediate anterooms and enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room at the back, you are enormously interested, excellently entertained.  The noise is the thing that impresses you first.  In most Village resorts you find quiet the order of the day—­or rather night.  Even “Polly’s,” crowded as it is,