sausage-vender, but aunt to the spry girl, sprang into the arena,
armed with the soup-ladle, and dispensed injustice on all sides.
The feud now reached its height. There is nothing that the chief
participants did not call one another, and no intimation or
aspersion concerning the reputation of ancestors to the remotest
generation that was not cast in the others' teeth. The spry girl
referred to the sausage-vender as a generalissimo of all the
fiends, and the compliments concerning the gentle art of cookery
which flew between the fritter-woman and the contralto will not
bear repetition. I listened breathlessly, hoping to hear one of
the party refer to somebody as the figure of a pig (strangely
enough the most unforgettable of insults), for each of the
combatants held, suspended in air, the weapon of his choice--broken
crockery, soup-ladle, rolling-pin, or sausage. Each, I say,
flourished the emblem of his craft wildly in the air--and then,
with a change of front like that of the celebrated King of France
in the Mother Goose rhyme, dropped it swiftly and silently; for at
this juncture the Little Genius flew down the broad staircase from
her eagle's nest. Her sculptor's smock surmounted her blue cotton
gown, and her blond hair was flying in the breeze created by her
rapid descent. I wish I could affirm that by her gentle dignity
and serene self-control she awed the company into silence, or that
there was a holy dignity about her that held them spellbound; but
such, unhappily, is not the case. It was her pet blue pitcher that
had been broken--the pitcher that was to serve as just the right
bit of colour at the evening's feast. She took command of the
situation in a masterly manner--a manner that had American energy
and decision as its foundation and Italian fluency as its
superstructure. She questioned the virtue of no one's ancestors,
cast no shadow of doubt on the legitimacy of any one's posterity,