L'Arrabiata and Other Tales

L'Arrabiata and Other Tales is by Paul Heyse, rendered from the German by Mary Wilson. The contents list names tales called L'Arrabiata, Count Ernest's Home, Blind and Walter's Little Mother, among others. A tale headed L'ARRABIATA opens as the day has scarcely dawned, with one broad grey stripe of mist hanging over Vesuvius and stretching across as far as Naples.

In one scene a woman falls upon a man's neck and cries, I cannot bear it, clinging to him as a dying thing to life. In another scene a lady asks, after a silence of several minutes, whether it would not be possible to procure a litter and carry the child to the nearest place where a doctor resided. Hansel the forester's assistant is reported to have said that his friend Sepp had to wait another week to have the ball extracted from his thigh, for the doctor himself was ill, from a fall from his horse. In one conversation a speaker recalls the bench where skates were fastened when they started on that skating expedition with a cousin named Lucy.