On one occasion, being left for some time alone in my own library at the villa, I remembered that in an upper drawer of an old oaken escritoire that stood there, had always been a few keys belonging to the doors of cellars and rooms in the house. I looked, and found them lying there as usual; they all had labels attached to them, signifying their use, and I turned them over impatiently, not finding what I sought. I was about to give up the search, when I perceived a large rusty iron key that had slipped to the back of the drawer; I pulled it out, and to my satisfaction it was labeled "Mausoleum." I immediately took possession of it, glad to have obtained so useful and necessary an implement; I knew that I should soon need it. The cemetery was quite deserted at this festive season--no one visited it to lay wreaths of flowers or sacred mementoes on the last resting-places of their friends. In the joys of the carnival who thinks of the dead? In my frequent walks there I was always alone; I might have opened my own vault and gone down into it without being observed, but I did not; I contented myself with occasionally trying the key in the lock, and assuring myself that it worked without difficulty.
Returning from one of these excursions late on a mild afternoon toward the end of the week preceding my marriage, I bent my steps toward the Molo, where I saw a picturesque group of sailors and girls dancing one of those fantastic, graceful dances of the country, in which impassioned movement and expressive gesticulation are everything. Their steps were guided and accompanied by the sonorous twanging of a full-toned guitar and the tinkling beat of a tambourine. Their handsome, animated faces, their flashing eyes and laughing lips, their gay, many-colored costumes, the glitter of beads on the brown necks of the maidens, the red caps jauntily perched on the thick black curls of the fishermen--all made up a picture full of light and life thrown up into strong relief against the pale gray and amber tints of the February sky and sea; while shadowing overhead frowned the stern dark walls of the Castel Nuovo.
It was such a scene as the English painter Luke Fildes might love to depict on his canvas--the one man of to-day who, though born of the land of opaque mists and rain-burdened clouds, has, notwithstanding these disadvantages, managed to partly endow his brush with the exhaustless wealth and glow of the radiant Italian color. I watched the dance with a faint sense of pleasure--it was full of so much harmony and delicacy of rhythm. The lad who thrummed the guitar broke out now and then into song--a song in dialect that fitted into the music of the dance as accurately as a rosebud into its calyx. I could not distinguish all the words he sung, but the refrain was always the same, and he gave it in every possible inflection and variety of tone, from grave to gay, from pleading to pathetic.