though much milder than they were a few
years ago. Most of these vagabonds have
run away from home, leaving behind them
parents or families who are respectable;
or, if young, have been sold or "farmed
out " to master organ-grinders, with or
without their parents' consent, at so much
a head, or in gangs of six or eight, like
convicts. It is quite a mistake to suppose
that these wanderers are the outpourings
of the Italian streets. They are generally
vagrants and beggars—perhaps criminals—
because they have come to England. In
their own country they have the means of
subsistence.

Many of the organ-grinders of London
are peasants from the mountain districts
of Italy. They speak a language of their
own—a patois made up of the waifs and
strays of various dialects—a kind of Babel
of sounds which would be unintelligible
in the cities and large towns of their
native land. Most of the image-men are
Tuscans, or inhabitants of Lucca and
Modena. The hurdy-gurdy boys are Savoyards
and Piedmontese. The pifferari, or
Italian pipers, some of whom have bagpipes
like the Scotch Highlanders, are Sicilians
and Calabresi; but in some rare instances a
Roman or a Tuscan minstrel is to be found
in the streets of London dancing a jig or
singing a plaintive song in pure Italian.
Most of these adventurers live and vegetate
in the dark courts and alleys of Clerkenwell
and Soho-square—haunts of vice and
misery, where Italy may look for her
exiled children any day in the year, and
claim them, too, if she have a mind (which
she has not), together with all the organ-
grinders or others who infest the metropolis.
One and all are peasants, or relatives
and friends of peasants; people who began
life as farmers or farm-servants—landlords
of wretched hovels—landed proprietors of
fields and cabbage gardens.

The peasantry of Italy may be divided
into two great classes: the contadini and
the paesani, or the upper and lower classes
of peasants. The cultivators of the soil
are an independent race. They are the
fellow-labourers of the ox, but they are not
ploughmen or peasants in the English
sense of the word. They associate with
dogs, horses, and sheep; but they are their
own masters. They are the children of
Nature. They call themselves the citizens
of the woods. They are proud and ignorant
at the same time. They have a
flower's right to grow on their native
heath, a lark's privilege to sing in the
fields. They are as much a part of the
landscape as the trees themselves. Their
defect is that they take root. You may cut
them down, or they will die in their places,
as their fathers did before them; but you
cannot induce them to leave the country,
unless it be for criminal or political reasons.

Let us take a glance at the English
peasant, and compare his qualities—good, bad,
or indifferent—with those of the Italian
contadino.

We all know the defects of the English
swain; how rude he is, how unwieldy, how
unable to compete with mechanics in the
race for wealth. In nine cases out of ten
he is a mere drudge, a thing and not a
man, part of the machinery of a farm-house;
in some cases a pauper, and in others a
slave—if people can be called slaves who
have the right to die of starvation and
the liberty to go to the workhouse! But,
in spite of his defects, and the defects of
his position, he is a more substantial being
than his Italian prototype. He has greater
powers of endurance, and he endures with
a better grace. He is thankful for small
mercies; he works and plays with a will;
and he starves in a good-humoured sort of
way, as if he thought his time were come.
But send him abroad, put him on his own
land in a new country, give him in
Australia or America the chances which an
Italian peasant has at home, and ten to one
he will prosper, and bring about, or help
to bring about, the prosperity of others.
For the English working-man is never more
at home than when he is abroad. He
knows that he is a man as well as an
Englishman; an inhabitant of the earth, not of
a part of it; a native of the land on whose
possessions the sun never sets. Not so the
Italian peasant. For him Italy is everything,
the world nothing. If he transplants
himself, he languishes. He knows no history
but the history of Rome, no sun but that
which shines on his father's fields. He
likes money well enough, but he would
rather live on a crust of bread or chestnut
flour in his own land (chestnut porridge is
the great staple of food in Central Italy)
than live on milk and honey in a foreign
clime. He owns, or partly owns, the field
he cultivates. He is never very rich, and
never utterly destitute. He may send his
wife and children out to beg, or become a
beggar himself when work is slack and the
winter harvest—that of the chestnut-tree—
has been gathered in, but he has always a
roof to cover him, a household fire from
which no landlord can expel him, a hut