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Updated: May 7, 2025
After our meal was over, I caught sight of a mandolin hanging up against the wall in Spain you see mandolins in every corner and I asked the little girl, who had been waiting on us, if she knew how to play it. "No," she replied. "But Don Jose does play well!" "Do me the kindness to sing me something," I said to him, "I'm passionately fond of your national music."
While you sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One Girl," and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Cafe Sibylla in Tivoli, but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some sixty-cent table d'hote, with wine and music included.
"Everybody go down on the dock when the supper bugle blows, instead of coming into the dining room." There was a mad rush for canoe partners, and a hasty gathering together of guitars and mandolins, which would certainly be in demand for the evening sing-out which would follow supper.
Another concert was given by the musicians, and as the steamer lay gently rocking upon the waters of the great sea, through the open front windows there floated out to our sister ship the sweet and pleasing strains of the violins and mandolins.
Carpets sewn in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a whole brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from their companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all the what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion.
The posturing women of the wooden kiosk caught up the chain of sound, and flung it on with their shrill voices down the hill towards Santa Lucia, where, by the waterside and the crowding white yachts, the itinerant musicians took it into the keeping of their guitars, their mandolins, their squeaky fiddles, and their hot and tremulous voices.
A certain Portuguese lady of noble birth had been left a widow with two daughters, and a fine estate to share between them. The daughters were handsome; but the estate was so much handsomer, that it set all the mandolins of the Portuguese inamoratos strumming under the windows of the lady's abode from sunset to the dawn of day.
Not far from us in a gondola, hung with coloured lanterns which were reflected in the water, there were people singing. The sounds of guitars, of violins, of mandolins, of men's and women's voices, were audible in the dark. Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a grave, almost stern face, was sitting beside me, compressing her lips and clenching her hands.
That would be much prettier than to picnic on uncomfortable rocks out in the sea with nothing but cold things to eat and only the moon for an illumination. I am sure Beatrice would like it much better." San Miniato laughed. "What a prosaic person you are!" he exclaimed. "Can you not imagine that a young girl's disposition may be softened by moonlight, mandolins and night breezes?" "No.
The sounds contended with a thin, scattered strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle of glasses, the steady click of dominoes and backgammon; then were drowned in the harsh chatter of Arab coolies who, all grimed as black as Nubians, and shouldering spear-headed shovels, tramped inland, their long tunics stiff with coal-dust, like a band of chain-mailed Crusaders lately caught in a hurricane of powdered charcoal.
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