Pumpkin-seeds!  These are extensively eaten in Rome, as well as the seeds of pine-cones, acorns, and round yellow chick-peas; these supply the place occupied by ground-nuts in our more favored land.

There is this excitement about the tombolas in the Piazza Navona, that occasionally a panic seizes the crowd, and in the rush of people to escape from the square, some have their pockets picked, and some are trampled down, never to rise again.  Fortunately for Caper, no stampede took place on Advent Sunday, so that he lived to attend another grand tombola in the Villa Borghese.

This was held in the spring-time, and the promise of the ascension of a balloon added to the attractions of the lottery.  To enter the Villa, you had to purchase a tombola-ticket, whereas, in the Piazza Navona, this was unnecessary.  At one end of the amphitheatre of the villa, under the shade of the ilex-trees, a platform was erected, where the numbers were called out and the awards given.

Caper, Roejean, and another French artist, not of the French Academy, named Achille Legume, assisted at this entertainment.  Legume was a very pleasant companion, lively, good-natured, with a decided penchant for the pretty side of humanity, and continually haunted with the idea that a princess was to carry him off from his mistress in spectacles, Madame Art, and convey him to the land of Cocaigne, where they never make, only buy, paintings—­of which articles, in parenthesis, Monsieur Achille had a number for sale.

‘Roejean,’ said Legume, ’do you notice that distinguished lady on the platform; isn’t she the Princess Faniente?  She certainly looked at me very peculiarly a few minutes since.’

‘It is the Princess,’ answered Roejean, ’and I also noticed, a few minutes since, when I was on the other side of the circus, that she looked at ME with an air.’

‘Don’t quarrel,’ spoke Caper,’she probably regards you both equally, for —­she squints.’

This answer capsized Achille, who having a small red rose-bud in his button-hole, hoped that at a distance he might pass for a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and had conquered something, say something noble.

A wandering cigar-seller, with zigarri scelti, next demanded their attention, and Roejean commenced an inspection of the selected cigars, which are made by government, and sold at the fixed price of one and a half baiocchi each; even at this low price, the stock of the tobacco-factory paid thirteen per cent under Antonelli’s direction.

‘Antonelli makes a pretty fair cigar,’ said, ’but I wish he would wrap the ends a little tighter.  I’m sorry to hear he is going out of the business.’

‘Why, he would stay in,’ answered Caper, ’but what with baking all the bread for Rome, and attending to all the fire-wood sold, and trying to make Ostia a seaport, and having to fight Monsieur About, and looking after his lotteries and big pawnbroker’s shop, and balancing himself on the end of a very sharp French bayonet, his time is so occupied, he can not roll these cigars so well as they ought to be rolled....  But they have called out number forty-nine; you’ve got it, Legume, I remember you wrote it down.  Yes, there it is.’