A Roman Singer | Page 2

to please her, for I told her our proverb, which says there can be nothing so untidy about a house as children and chickens. He was such a dirty little boy, with only one shoe and a battered hat, and he was always singing at the top of his voice, and throwing things into the well in the cortile.
Mariuccia can read a little, though I never believed it until I found her one day teaching Nino his letters out of the Vite dei Santi. That was probably the first time that her reading was ever of any use to her, and the last, for I think she knows the Lives of the Saints by heart, and she will certainly not venture to read a new book at her age. However, Nino very soon learned to know as much as she, and she will always be able to say that she laid the foundation of his education. He soon forgot to throw handfuls of mud into the well, and Mariuccia washed him, and I bought him a pair of shoes, and we made him look very decent. After a time he did not even remember to pull the cat's tail in the morning, so as to make her sing with him, as he said. When Mariuccia went to church she would take him with her, and he seemed very fond of going, so that I asked him one day if he would like to be a priest when he grew up, and wear beautiful robes, and have pretty little boys to wait on him with censers in their hands.
"No," said the little urchin, stoutly, "I won't be a priest." He found in his pocket a roast chestnut Mariuccia had given him, and began to shell it.
"Why are you always so fond of going to church then?" I asked.
"If I were a big man," quoth he, "but really big, I would sing in church, like Maestro De Pretis."
"What would you sing, Nino?" said I, laughing. He looked very grave, and got a piece of brown paper and folded it up. Then he began to beat time on my knees and sang out boldly, Cornu ejus exaltabitur.
It was enough to make one laugh, for he was only seven years old, and ugly too. But Mariuccia, who was knitting in the hall-way, called out that it was just what Maestro Ercole had sung the day before at vespers, every syllable.
I have an old piano in my sitting-room. It is a masterpiece of an instrument, I can tell you; for one of the legs is gone and I propped it up with two empty boxes, and the keys are all black except those that have lost the ivory--and those are green. It has also five pedals, disposed as a harp underneath; but none of them make any impression on the sound, except the middle one, which rings a bell. The sound-board has a crack in it somewhere, Nino says, and two of the notes are dumb since the great German maestro came home with my boy one night, and insisted on playing an accompaniment after supper. We had stewed chickens and a flask of Cesanese, I remember, and I knew something would happen to the piano. But Nino would never have any other, for De Pretis had a very good one; and Nino studies without anything--just a common tuning-fork that he carries in his pocket. But the old piano was the beginning of his fame. He got into the sitting-room one day, by himself, and found out that he could make a noise by striking the keys, and then he discovered that he could make tunes, and pick out the ones that were always ringing in his head. After that he could hardly be dragged away from it, so that I sent him to school to have some quiet in the house.
He was a clever boy, and I taught him Latin and gave him our poets to read; and as he grew up I would have made a scholar of him, but he would not. At least, he was willing to learn and to read; but he was always singing too. Once I caught him declaiming "Arma virumque cano" to an air from Trovatore, and I knew he could never be a scholar then, though he might know a great deal. Besides, he always preferred Dante to Virgil, and Leopardi to Horace.
One day, when he was sixteen or thereabouts, he was making a noise, as usual, shouting some motive or other to Mariuccia and the cat, while I was labouring to collect my senses over a lecture I had to prepare. Suddenly his voice cracked horribly and his singing ended in a sort of groan. It happened again once or twice, the next day, and