With the whole street
looking on, they are as unconscious and natural as if they were where
no eye could see them,--ay, and more natural, too, than it is possible
for some people to be, even in the privacy of their solitary rooms.
They sing at the top of their lungs as they sit on their door-steps at
their work, and often shout from house to house across the street a
long conversation, and sometimes even read letters from upper windows
to their friends below in the street. The men and women who cry their
fruits, vegetables, and wares up and down the city, laden with baskets
or panniers, and often accompanied by a donkey, stop to chat with group
after group, or get into animated debates about prices, or exercise
their wits and lungs at once in repartee in a very amusing way.
Everybody is in dishabille in the morning, but towards twilight the
girls put on their better dresses, and comb their glossy raven hair,
heaping it up in great solid braids, and, hanging two long golden
ear-rings in their ears and _collane_ round their full necks, come
forth conquering and to conquer, and saunter bare-headed up and down
the streets, or lounge about the doorways or piazzas in groups, ready
to give back to any jeerer as good as he sends. You see them marching
along sometimes in a broad platoon of five or six, all their brows as
straight as if they had been ruled, and their great dark eyes flashing
out under them, ready in a moment for a laugh or a frown.
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