Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

308 MILITARY LIFE.
up her mouth and drooping her head with its false curls on one
side in a melancholy way. In the window next hers usually
stood her cook, who was seized with an incipient passion for
my orderly (a handsome fellow, in parenthesis) she had a
;
round face, quite purple in color, and so puffed out that it
seemed as if she were continually blowing ; great lips, large
eyes, immense shoulders, with a broad curve here and there,
which could be seen even from the most distant quarter of
the house. On the third floor above the languid nymph,
lived a student of the University, who was very young, a
good sort of fellow, crazy about the war, already enrolled
in the volunteers, one of the dearest and most curious of
jovial people. At any hour of the day, when I clapped my
hands, he would spring on to the terrace, with his arms and
face in the air like an improvisatore questioning
and replying
to me in verse, would start discussions on the higher politics,
war, philosophy, and literature, declaiming, gesticulating, and
humming in a most amusing
manner. At the sound of his
voice the entire neighborhood would appear at the windows.
Then followed a vast amount of hilarity on all the floors.
" I
like youth like this," murmured the poor old man. And the
cook hid behind a blind and burst into a fit of laughter. Her
mistress pursed her mouth into a smile which was intended to
say " What dear idiots " : ! The Neapolitan lady flung a bonmot
at me, my sister ran off,
my mother pulled me by the coat,
and my brother muttered " This is too much." Then my
:
cousin, the colonel, when he was there, a stiff, austere soldier,
who was really fond of me, but he gave me great wiggings, for
which reason I called him beneficent executioner, said to me
gravely:
" ''
Do be serious !