That was a great day for me!

Heretofore I had been looked upon as a squatter:
possessing certain rights, of course, and more or less
welcome because of sundry lire expended for the temporary
use of fishing boats with sails up,--but still
an interloper. Now I became one of the thousand
families and the million children. These were all
in evidence in less than ten seconds; the peculiar
quality of that scream had done it; not only from
the top story of the highest rookery did they swarm,
but from every near-by campo, and way back to the
shipyards.

Luigi pushed the gondola to the quay and I
lifted out the water-soaked, blue-lipped little tot,
her hair flattened against her cheeks (she was
laughing now,--"It was nothing," she said, "my
foot slipped,") and placed her in the hands of
the longest-armed fishwife; and then Luigi disappeared
into a door, level with the quay, from which
he reappeared ten minutes later in a suit of dry
clothes, the property of a fisherman, and of so grotesque
a fit, the trousers reaching to his knees and the
cuffs of the coat to his elbows, that he set the population
in a roar. My Luigi, you might as well
know, is six feet and an inch, with the torso of a
Greek god and a face that is twin to Colleone's, and,
furthermore, is quite as distinguished looking as that
gentleman on horseback, even if he does wear a straw