Just why they don't want the Signora to
have tables in her own back yard is not clear. She, being a Latin,
shrugs her shoulders and makes no comment. Standing in the darkness,
there is a real freshness in the air; there is also a delicious,
gurgling sound, the music of summer streams.
"How lovely!" you whisper. "What a delightful, rippling sound."
"Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel," says La Signora sweetly.
There is, at Bertolotti's one of the queerest little old figures in
all that part of the world, the bent and aged Italian known
universally as _Castagna_ (Chestnuts), because of the interminable
anecdotes he tells over and over again. No one knows his real name,
not even the Signor or the Signora. Yet he has worked for them for
years. He wants no wages--only a living and a home. In the
aforementioned back yard he has built himself a little house about the
size of a dog kennel. It is a real house, and like nothing so much as
the historic residence of the Three Bears. It has a window, eaves,
weather-strips and a clothesline, for he does his own washing.
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