Pascarl - 1900 Author:Ouida Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BY THB BROKEN DQNATBLLO. ft CHAPTER III. ET THB BHOKBN DOICATELLO. Thb first thing I remember is of how poor we all were; how horribly poor, how terribl... more »y poor! When I went to take my first dancing lesson at four years old I had holes in my little lace frock, and a pair of faded blue shoes nearly out at the toes. I cried bitterly for very shame sake. " Never mind, carina," said old Mariuccia, my nurse. " Never mind. If you dance away with a light heart, what does a tatter or two in the dress signify ? It is better to have holes in the shoes, little one, than a leaden weight on the feet, believe me." Oh! and what a fcol I thought her! Though she was sixty and I was not six. But when my father's man Florio came in and lifted me up hefore the old battered silver mirror, and murmured in his soft tongue, "Ah! what does a shabby frock matter when one has an angel's face like the signorina's ? The other little ladies may be all hung with rubies and pearls if they choose; nobody will look at them if the signorina bo there"—then, indeed, there seemed some sense in the argument, and Florio appeared to me a person so discerning that I consented to be pacified and to be led away to the vast bare frescoed dancing-hall, where one little shrill fiddle was piping and shrieking to a score of Lombardic babies, all more or less noble, I believe, in descent. We were at that time in Verona. Poor old Verona! World forgotten, though having given so much to the world. The city of Lesbia's lover is but a sorry desolation now, despite its hidden treasures, that no man remembers once in a teore of years. These narrow sun-baked streets, those grim dust-covered fortifications, those little lines of stunted sickly trees, those simooms of lime dust, those bitter piercing mountain wi...« less