younger ones Katy guessed to be seminary students under his charge. Her chief amusement through the long dusty journey was in watching the terrible time that one of these young men was having with his hat. It was a large three-cornered black affair, with sharp angles and excessively stiff, and a perpetual struggle seemed to be going on between it and its owner, who was evidently unhappy when it was on his head, and still more unhappy when it was anywhere else. If he perched it on his knees it was sure to slide away from him and fall with a thump on the floor, whereupon he would pick it up, blushing furiously as he did so. Then he would lay it on the seat when the train stopped at a station, and jump out with an air of relief; but he invariably forgot, and sat down upon it when he returned, and sprang up with a look of horror at the loud crackle it made. Then he would tuck it into the baggage rack overhead, from which it would presently descend, generally into the lab of one of the staid English ladies, who would hand it back to him with an air of deep offence, remarking to her companion:

`I never knew anything like it. Fancy! That makes four times that hat has fallen on me. The young man is a fidget! He's the most fidgety creature I ever saw in my life.'

The young seminariat did not understand a word she said, but the tone needed no interpreter, and set him to blushing more painfully than ever. Altogether, the hat was never off his mind for a moment. Katy could see that he was thinking about it, even when he was thumbing his breviary and pretending to read.

At last the train, steaming down the valley of the Arno, revealed fair Florence sitting among olive-clad hills, with Giotti's beautiful belltower, and the great, many-coloured, soft-hued cathedral, and the square tower of the old Palace, and the quaint bridges over the river, looking exactly as they do in the photographs; and Katy would have felt delighted, in spite of dust and fatigue, had not Amy looked so worn out and exhausted. They were seriously troubled by her, and for the moment could think of nothing else. Happily the fatigue did no permanent harm, and a day or two of rest made her all right again. By good fortune, a nice little apartment in the modern quarter of the city had been vacated by its winter occupants the very day of their arrival, and Mrs Ashe secured it for a month, with all its conveniences and advantages, including a maid named Maria, who had been servant to the just departed tenants.

Maria was a very tall woman, at least six feet two, and had a splendid contralto voice, which she occasionally exercised while busy over her pots and pans. It was so remarkable to hear these grand arias and recitatives proceeding from a kitchen some eight feet square, that Katy was at great pains to satisfy her curiosity about it. By aid of the dictionary and much persistent questioning, she made out that Maria in her youth had received a partial training for the opera, but it was decided that she was too big and heavy for the stage, and the poor `giantess', as Amy named her, had been forced to abandon her career, and gradually had sunk to the position of a maid-of-all-work. Katy suspected that heaviness of mind as well as of body must have stood in her way, for Maria, though a good-natured giantess, was by no means quick of intelligence.

`I do think that the manner in which people over here can make homes for themselves at five minutes' notice is perfectly delightful,' cried Katy, at the end of their first day's housekeeping. `I wish we could do the same in America. How cosy it looks here already!'

It was indeed cosy. Their new domain consisted of a parlour in a comer, furnished in bright yellow brocade, with windows to south and west, a nice little dining room, three bedrooms, with dimity-curtained beds, a square entrance hall, lighted at night by a tall slender brass lamp whose double wicks were fed with olive-oil, and the aforesaid tiny kitchen, behind which was a sleeping cubby-hole, quite too small to be a good fit for the giantess. The rooms were full of conveniences - easy chairs, sofas, plenty of bureaus and dressing-tables, and corner fireplaces like Franklin stoves, in which fires burned on cool days. The fires were made of pine cones, cakes of pressed sawdust exactly like Boston brown bread cut into slices, and a few sticks of wood thriftily adjusted, for fuel is worth its weight in gold in Florence. Katy's was the smallest of the bedrooms, but she liked it best of all for the reason that its one big window opened on to an iron balcony, over which grew a Banksia rose vine with a stem as thick as her wrist. It was