OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN 



There were no doubt other very simple reasons for these 

 catastrophes : the pitiable poverty of the family which had 

 made it necessary for the poor woman to sell her mother- 

 rights, and possibly the tainted milk of the sick cow which 

 had poisoned the little mountaineer. But call it fate, or the 

 intolerable economic system of modern Italy, it came round 

 in the end to the same thing. " Do not grieve, car a moglie. 

 It is the will of God!" 



She had done her best to help her own, and this was her 

 comfort in her sorrow. It was not such a bad comfort / 

 and the most advanced thinker cannot prove after all that 

 it was not the will of God. 



It was difficult, too, for the foster-mother to weep long 

 when Baby Maddalena danced on the stone of the terrace 

 with little bare brown feet. She had the bluest eyes and 

 the brownest face that ever we beheld, and laughed and 

 gurgled as she danced, with very high action, upheld by 

 the ends of her sash by the adoring Balia, whose own face 

 and neck above her string of gold beads were the colour of 

 a ripe apricot. 



It would be difficult to have devised a fortnight of greater 

 interest, amusement, and quaintness than that of this 

 Piedmontese visit. It was a thoroughly foreign house- 

 hold. The handsome white-bearded athletic father of the 

 Chatelaine, tied to his chair by an attack of gout, had his 

 apartments downstairs. And on an upper floor the 

 mother of the Marchese had her own complete establish- 

 ment, including a wonderful library, all tawny gold. There 

 was a baroque Chapel / and one of our most vivid re- 

 collections was our pulling the children down by their sashes 

 as they swung themselves over the tops of the benches, 

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