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Updated: May 10, 2025
"Do not think of it this year, my dear child," replied her mother. "We must be glad if we have bread enough to eat." But Piccola could not believe that the good saint would forget her. On Christmas Eve she put her little wooden patten on the hearth before the fire, and went to sleep to dream of Saint Nicholas.
Round her neck was a string of beads, and on her feet were little wooden shoes. It would seem very strange to us would it not? to wear wooden shoes; but Piccola and her mother had never worn anything else, and never had any money to buy stockings. Piccola almost always ran about barefooted, like the kittens and the chickens and the little ducks.
So you see Piccola was alone a great deal of the time; and if she had not been a very happy, contented little child, I hardly know what she would have done. She had no playthings except a heap of stones in the back yard that she used for building houses and a very old, very ragged doll that her mother had found in the street one day.
She told her mother about Santa Claus, and her mother seemed to think that perhaps he did not know there was any little girl in that house, and very likely he would not come at all. But Piccola felt very sure Santa Claus would remember her, for her little friends had promised to send a letter up the chimney to remind him. Christmas Eve came at last.
Michal wrote and translated at the same time: "Let him who would see many days keep a spare table!" "The Italians say: 'La cucina piccola fa la casa grande, la tavola e un ladrone segreto! Write that down also and tell me what it means." The damsel recited as she wrote: "A small kitchen enlarges a house, but a liberal table is a secret thief!"
"But do not fancy," continued the Princess, laughing, "that you have had only this spy to encounter. Many others have watched your motions and your conversations, and all concur in saying you are the devil, and they could make nothing of you. But that, 'mia cara piccola diavolina', is just what we want!"
Piccola, I am not clever like thee; I cannot amuse myself like thee with books. I am in a foreign land. "Dearest Madre," said Isaura, half weeping too, "forgive me, you are right. The Greek jacket is splendid; I shall be so pleased to see you wear it: poor Madre! so pleased to think that in the foreign land you are not without something that pleases you!"
The English landlady of the Piccola Sentinella, who herself had an almost miraculous escape on the occasion, gave us a most vivid and heart-rending description of how her hotel and most of its inmates were overwhelmed on that awful July night, and how the existing inn is literally built upon foundations that are filled with many unrecovered bodies of victims.
Piccola's mother hurried home from her work; they had their little supper of soup and bread, and soon it was bedtime, time to get ready for Santa Claus. But oh! Piccola remembered then for the first time that the children had told her she must hang up her stocking, and she hadn't any, and neither had her mother. How sad, how sad it was!
"Piccola, piccola! com e cortese! another invitation from M. Louvier for next Saturday, conversazione." This was said in Italian by an elderly lady bursting noisily into the room, elderly, yet with a youthful expression of face, owing perhaps to a pair of very vivacious black eyes.
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