and the rich work, into which her delicate fingers had knit so many maiden dreams and hopes and fears, was offered for sale in the resort of strangers.  It could not have been want only that induced her to put this piece of work in the market, but the feeling, also, that the time never again could return when she would have need of it.  I had no desire to purchase such a melancholy coverlet, but I could well enough fancy why she would wish to part with what must be rather a pall than a decoration in her little chamber.

Fiammetta lived with her mother in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,—­a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges.  They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that lowest class, the young girls of which are little more than beasts of burden, accustomed to act as porters, bearing about on their heads great loads of stone, wood, water, and baskets of oranges in the shipping season.  She could not have been forced to such labor, or she never would have had the time to work that wonderful coverlet.

Giuseppe was an honest and rather handsome young fellow of Sorrento, industrious and good-natured, who did not bother his head much about learning.  He was, however, a skillful workman in the celebrated inlaid and mosaic woodwork of the place, and, it is said, had even invented some new figures for the inlaid pictures in colored woods.  He had a little fancy for the sea as well, and liked to pull an oar over to Capri on occasion, by which he could earn a few francs easier than he could saw them out of the orangewood.  For the stupid fellow, who could not read a word in his prayer-book, had an idea of thrift in his head, and already, I suspect, was laying up liras with an object.  There are one or two dandies in Sorrento who attempt to dress as they do in Naples.  Giuseppe was not one of these; but there was not a gayer or handsomer gallant than he on Sunday, or one more looked at by the Sorrento girls, when he had on his clean suit and his fresh red Phrygian cap.  At least the good Fiammetta thought so, when she met him at church, though I feel sure she did not allow even his handsome figure to come between her and the Virgin.  At any rate, there can be no doubt of her sentiments after church, when she and her mother used to walk with him along the winding Massa road above the sea, and stroll down to the shore to sit on the greensward over the Temple of Hercules, or the Roman Baths, or the remains of the villa of C. Fulvius Cunctatus Cocles, or whatever those ruins subterranean are, there on the Capo di Sorrento.  Of course, this is mere conjecture of mine.  They may have gone on the hills behind the town instead, or they may have stood