of this class sits at the corner of the Via Felice and Capo le Case, with his bench backed against the gray wall.  He is an oldish man, with a long, gray beard and a quizzical face,—­a sort of Hans Sachs, who turns all his life into verse and song.  When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention.  This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him.  Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse.  So he sits all day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd bits of character which chance may show him into rhythmic forms, and chirps and sings as perpetually as the cricket.  Friends he has without number, who stop before his bench, from which he administers poetical justice to all persons, to have a long chat, or sometimes to bring him a friendly token; and from the dark interior of his drawer he often brings forth an orange, or a bunch of grapes, or handful of chestnuts, supplied by them, as a dessert for the thick cabbage-soup which he eats at mezzo giorno.

In the busiest street of Rome, the pure Campagna song may often be heard from the throat of some contadino, as he slowly rumbles along in his loaded wine-cart,—­the little dog at his side barking a sympathetic chorus.  This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the Church chant.  It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred chromatic.  No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up again in the prestissimo time and “slowed” down to the same dismal conclusion.  Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable.  But when refined by distance, it has a sad and pleasant effect, and seems to belong to the place,—­the long wail at the close being the very type of the melancholy stretches of the Campagna.  In the same way I have frequently thought that the Jodeln of the Swiss was an imitation of the echo of the mountains, each note repeated first in octave, or fifth, and then in its third below.  The Campagna song is to be heard not only in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country,—­in the vineyards, in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working together, and from solitary contadini,—­wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt.  The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost.  It was only the other day, at nightfall, that I was sauntering out on the desolate Campagna towards Civita Vecchia.  The shadows were deepening and the mists beginning to creep whitely along the deep hollows.  Everything was dreary and melancholy