The humour of Italy

by Unknown

The Big Drum.

Of this it is quite unnecessary to speak. It is the instrument of the age; and ministers, deputies, men of science, poets, hairdressers, and dentists have all learned to perform on it to perfection.... The multitude will always answer the summons of its “boom! boom!”—and he will always be in the right who thumps it hardest.

A. Ghislanzoni.

THE DELIGHTS OF JOURNALISM.

“My dear boy,” said Giuntini, almost seriously, “I lost all my illusions at eighteen. At that epoch I believed that I possessed a sweetheart; I was also guilty of the audacity of writing verses to her. I lived on blue sky, diluted with milk and honey. Afterwards I found out that my verses were based on a false supposition, and that the girl I loved had married a custom house officer. This contributed in great part to the catastrophe which took place in my sentiments. At the present moment I have been writing in the papers for seventeen years. I get 250 francs a month here, on the Progressist; eighty francs from a paper at Udine, whose politics I do not even know; another sixty from the Courier of Fashion; and beside that, I send leading articles, at five francs apiece, to the Radical Phrygian Cap, of Rimini, and others to the Catholic Banner, of Genoa, which pays me eight francs for each. Add to this a sermon written now and then for the parish priest of our village at home—a conceited old fanatic who wants to be thought eloquent. Then I have to compile the Young Wife’s Almanac every year, and the Sportsman’s and Angler’s Calendar for the publisher, Corretti; so that, taking one month with another, I can reckon on about 500 francs. I say nothing of contriving to advertise various tradesmen and contractors, in the course of my daily paragraphs, which brings me in nice little sums now and then. Very well; every month I manage not to spend more than 200 francs, the rest I put aside. I don’t go to the theatre; I am not to be seen at cafés; as for lending money to my friends, you have perceived——”

“I have, alas!”

“There you have the explanation of my easy life. My dear fellow, the world is for him who knows how to take it.”

“It may be,” said Lauri; “the fault is mine. I don’t deny it. Sometimes, do you know, I think of the little village at the foot of the Alps, all white with snow in winter.... What a fuss they used to make over me when I came home for the holidays!... How my father used to rest his great rough hand on my head, and say, “There’s plenty inside here!” ... Well, and then came Sixty-six. Venice! Venice for ever! Garibaldi! Italy! Liberty!... In those days, as you know, we believed in all that—and I went to the Tyrol after Garibaldi. There was no holding me after that. I thought I had the whole world at my feet. I never even thought of the University Entrance Examination. To think of it! A warrior who has smelt powder to go back to a schoolboy’s tasks!... I could not even dream of such a thing—and of returning to the village even less. I should have had to talk politics with the chemist and the police-sergeant, when I had in my own person contributed to the unity of Italy. I do not know myself what grand dreams were shaping themselves in this stupid brain of mine. I went to Florence, and passed some months in wearing out the pavement of Via Tornabuoni and Via Calzaioli, and my father, poor dear old man! used to send me postal orders.... But I was going to make a career at Florence! I was always in company with some of my old comrades of the Tyrol, all of them fervent patriots, who passed most of their time in speaking ill of their neighbours on the sofas of the Bottegone. I began to make the acquaintance of deputies and journalists, lounged about the editorial offices of the Diritto and the Riforma, and talked glibly about the crisis, Reconstruction, and the fusion of parties. In short, I was well on the way to imbecility; and from thence to journalism is, as you know, but a step. And now, as I’ve made my bed, I’ve got to lie upon it, or throw myself out of the window.... There’s no father to send me postal orders now....”

Giuntini suddenly interrupted the flow of his reflections.

“I say, Manfredo, do you know it’s ten o’clock, and you have not written a line of the daily ‘summary’ yet?”

Lauri shook himself, re-lit his cigar, which had gone out, and once more began turning over the papers. Giuntini, too, had gone back to work; but he, like all journalists, could cut all Europe to pieces, though his thoughts were wandering in the sphere of the moon.

“What telegrams has the Times to-day?” he asked while scribbling away.

“None; neither the Times, nor the Daily News, nor the Temps, nor the Nord; they are all empty as my pockets. I don’t in the least know how to make up this evening’s Foreign Intelligence. There is a little about Afghanistan in the République, but all stale matter hashed up for the third or fourth time. I shall have to end by translating the latest Assembly scandal from the Figaro.”

Enrico Onufrio.

WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK.

It is said among business men that it requires twelve Jews to cheat a Genoese; but twelve Genoese are not enough to cheat a Greek.... Only one person, that I ever heard of, enjoys the not very enviable distinction of having cheated—not merely one Greek, but two.

He was a Bari man.

He was returning to Italy, but had no boots—or rather, the things he had were no longer boots. He carefully counted up his money, found that he had not enough to buy a new pair, and so quieted his conscience. Then he went to a shoemaker’s in the Street of Hermes.[^[11]]

“I want a pair of shoes by Monday morning, to fit me exactly, with round toes,” etc.; in short, he gave the fullest directions.

“Certainly, sir. You shall have them without fail. They shall be sent to your house at ten on Monday morning.”

The Bari man left his address and departed.

In the Street of Æolus he entered another shoemaker’s shop and ordered a precisely similar pair of shoes in the same terms.

“Have I made myself understood?”

“Perfectly. Let me have the address, and on Monday at ten——”

“I shall not be in at ten. Don’t send them before eleven.”

“At eleven you may count on having them, without fail.”

On Monday at ten the first victim appeared. The gentleman tried on the shoes; the right was a perfect fit, the left was fearfully tight over the instep; it wanted stretching a little.

“All right,” said the obliging tradesman; “I will take it away, and bring it back to you to-morrow.”

“Very well; and I will settle your account then.”

The shoemaker bowed himself out with the left shoe.

At eleven, punctual as a creditor, arrived the second predestined victim. The same scene was repeated; but this time it was the right shoe that did not fit.

“You will have to put it over the last again, my friend.”

“We’ll soon set that right, sir.” And this shoemaker, more knowing than the other, was about to take both shoes away with him.

“Leave the other,” said the Bari man. “It’s a fancy of mine ... if you take them both, some one may come in and find that they fit him, and you will sell them to him, and I shall have to wait another week.”

“But I assure you, sir——”

“No, no, my friend; I know how things go. I want this pair of shoes and no other, and I insist on keeping the one.” The shoemaker bowed his head with a sigh, and went away to stretch the right shoe.

An hour later the Bari man and his shoes were already on board the Piræus steamer; and on the following day the two victims met on his doorstep, each with a shoe in his hand, and looked into each other’s rapidly lengthening faces.

Napoleone Corazzini.

THE FAMOUS TENOR, SPALLETTI.

About a week after my arrival at Athens I was enjoying a tête-à-tête, at the Samos Restaurant, with a lamb cutlet of most unexampled obduracy, when there entered a stout individual, somewhere on the wrong side of fifty, dressed with great care, and sporting a gold chain of such length and massiveness that it might have served to fasten up a mastiff. His hands were covered with rings; and, in entering, he made noise enough for ten. Accosting a waiter who could speak Italian, he roared—

“WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK.”

“Giuraddio! What has become of my place?”

“This way,—this way, sir; there are four places at this table.”

It was the one where I was sitting.

The stout gentleman contorted his features with disgust, uttered language which would have been enough for any Arian, and came and sat beside me, remarking—

“Giuraddio! I don’t want my place taken!”

Every one present was looking at him, and smiling compassionately.

Before he had finished unfolding his napkin he was already asking me—

“Are you Italian, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Been in Athens long?”

“A few days.”

“I have been here three months. Every one knows me.”

“I should think so, if you always make as much noise as that.”

“You see how they are looking at me?”

“I have noticed it.”

“I ... I suppose you know who I am?”

“I have not that honour.”

“I am the celebrated Spalletti.... You will know——”

“No. I confess my ignorance.”

“Giuraddio! half the newspapers in the world have noticed me.”

“I read very few newspapers.”

“Why?”

“Because I am a journalist.”

“I am here. I have already given six representations of Le Prophète.”

“And you are——”

“The celebrated tenor, Spalletti.”

“Blessed be modesty!”

“Eh!—What?”

“Nothing—only a remark on my part. A fine opera, Le Prophète.”

“Yes—so they say!”

“How—they say? Have you never heard it?”

“I!—I have other things to do. I get through my scenes, and that’s enough.”

“But have you not even read the words?”

“I have read my part,—and even that is too much. However, I think I will read it over one evening when I am going to bed, because I want to know who on earth this Prophet is.”

Yet it was this very part of the Prophet which he had just enacted for the sixth time!

He then told me that he had been engaged to sing in Thomas’s Omeleto—I should not have been surprised had he said omelette—and left, after telling me that he put up at the Gran Bretagna, and requesting me to come and see him there.

At the door he turned back, and said—

“You must come and hear me at the theatre to-night! I am quite convinced I shall make you shed tears.”

I went—and found that the worthy man was right. His performance was such that it would have drawn tears from a stone.

I afterwards heard that the same gentleman had been asked to sing at a charity concert, and, being told that in this way he would perform an act of philanthropy, had replied that it was unfortunately impossible, because he was not acquainted with the play of that name, and therefore could not sing in any act of it.

Napoleone Corazzini.

RIVAL EARTHQUAKES.

There was a long-standing rivalry—and one that was not professional alone—between the telegraph clerks of Pietranera and Golastretta. It is said to have begun at the Technical College, when the former carried off a silver medal hotly contested by the other; but this is not quite certain.

What is certain is that Pippo Corradi could not undertake the smallest thing but Nino d’Arco immediately proceeded to do likewise. Thus when the former took a fancy to become an amateur conjurer, Nino at once went in search of the necessary apparatus for amusing his friends with the miracles of white magic. He was not a success; he raised many a laugh by his want of skill; but this did not prevent him from throwing away more money still on boxes with false bottoms, pistols to shoot playing cards instead of balls, wonderful balls which multiply and grow larger in your hands, and the like. Cost what it might, he was determined to astonish his Golastretta friends, who extolled in his presence the portents they had seen accomplished at Pietranera by Corradi, and derided him by way of contrast.

Then when Pippo Corradi, who was of a strange fickleness in his tastes, gave up white magic in order to devote himself to music, and the study of the clarionet in particular, Nino d’Arco suddenly laid aside the magic toys, which had already wearied him not a little, took music lessons from the parish organist, bought a brand new ebony clarionet, and rode over on a donkey to call on Corradi, under the pretext of consulting him on his choice, but with the sole intention of humiliating him. It was the only time he ever succeeded. He found him blowing into the mouthpiece of a box-wood instrument, which he had bought second-hand for a few francs from an old clarionet player in the town band. Nino swelled visibly with satisfaction at seeing the admiration and envy in his rival’s eyes when he opened the leather case and showed him the polished keys of white metal, shining even more than the freshly varnished wood.

Nino put the instrument together delicately, and set it to his mouth, thinking to astonish Pippo with a scale in semitones, but he unluckily broke down in the middle. Then was Corradi able to take his revenge; and not content with having played scales in all tones, major, minor, diatonic, and chromatic, suddenly, without warning Nino, who kept staring at his fingers manœuvring over the holes and keys, he dashed point-blank into his pièce-de-résistance, La Donna è Mobile, tootling away quite divinely, till checked by the imperative need of taking breath. His eyes were nearly starting out of his head; his face was purple—but that was nothing! He chuckled inwardly at Nino’s crestfallen look; and the latter, taking his instrument to pieces, put it back in the case, thus declaring himself vanquished.

Nino, returning to Golastretta, vented his vexation on his ass, because she would not go at a trot—just as though it had been she who taught Corradi to play La Donna è Mobile. So true it is that passion renders man unjust! He rushed at once to his master to learn La Donna è Mobile for himself, so as to be able, in a short time, to play it before his hated rival. The latter, however, had another great advantage, besides that of being able to murder Rigoletto; he was the local post-master. In this point it was useless trying to rival him, however much Nino might dream of a spacious office, like that at Pietranera, where Corradi, between the sale of one stamp and the next, between registering a letter, and administering a reprimand to the postman, could divert himself by blowing into his clarionet to his heart’s content! Whereas he, Nino, was forced to escape from the house if he wished to practise and remain at peace with his family! Corradi, in his post-office, disturbed no one.

Nino did not know what a torment for the neighbourhood that clarionet was, shrilling from morning to night, with Corradi’s usual obstinacy in anything he undertook. The shopkeeper opposite, poor wretch, swore all day long worse than a Turk, and did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet every time that Pippo began to repeat the Donna è Mobile—that is to say, swore seven or eight times in the day. He made mistakes in his weights, he counted his change wrong;—though it is only fair to say that these errors were oftener in his own favour than in that of his customers. And if by any chance he saw Corradi at the window, he raised his hands towards him with a supplicating gesture, pretending to be jocular.

“You want to make me die of a fit! Good Lord!”

Of all this Nino d’Arco was quite ignorant when he started for Pietranera a month later, to surprise Corradi with Mira Norma, which he had learnt, in addition to the air which first roused his emulation. He found Pippo adding up his monthly accounts, and not disposed to talk about music or anything else. The fact was that the shopkeeper opposite had indeed fallen down dead in a fit at the third or fourth rendering of La Donna è Mobile, as he had said, just as though he had had a presentiment of what was to happen. The occurrence had such an effect on Pippo that he felt as if he had killed the man, and could not bear to touch the clarionet again. He would not even mention the subject. Nino bit his lips and returned home, without having so much as opened his clarionet case. Once more it was the ass who paid the penalty. He had to relieve his feelings on some one or something.

If there were any need of an instance to prove that emulation is the most powerful agent in the development of the human faculties, this one would suffice. Seeing that Corradi had renounced the clarionet and all its delights, Nino no longer felt the slightest inclination to go on wasting his breath on his instrument, though it were of ebony, with keys of white metal. As a faithful historian, I ought to add that for one moment he was tempted by the idea of trying to attain to the glory of causing some one’s death by a fit; but whether the Golastretta people had harder tympanums than those of Pietranera, or whether he himself was not possessed of the necessary strength and perseverance, certain it is that no human victim fell to Nino d’Arco’s clarionet. And the fact of having no death on his conscience made him feel degraded in his own eyes for some time.

These had been the preludes to deeper and more difficult contests with his old schoolfellow.

Golastretta was situated between the central office of the province and the rival station of Pietranera; and thus it was Nino’s duty to signal to his hated colleague the mean time by which he was to regulate his clock—a supremacy which Corradi could never take from him. But this was a joy of short duration.

Having very little to do, he was wont, after he had finished reading the Gazette or the last paper-covered novel, to snatch forty winks at his ease in the office. One morning, when he least expected it, the machine began clicking, and would not stop. It was his dear friend at Pietranera who kept sending despatches on despatches, and would not let him drop off comfortably.

By listening attentively, he soon made out what was the matter. The village of Pietranera had begun, on the previous evening, to dance like a man bitten by the tarantula, set in motion by earthquake-shocks repeated from hour to hour. The Syndic was telegraphing to the Vice-Prefect, the Prefect, the Meteorological Office of the province, in the name of the terrified population. And Corradi, too, was telegraphing on his own account, signalling the shocks as fast as they occurred, and indicating their length, or the nature of the movement—in order to gain credit with his superiors, said Nino d’Arco, vexed that Golastretta should not have its half-dozen earthquakes as well.

How cruelly partial was Nature! Scarcely twenty kilomètres away she was rendering Corradi an immense service with eight, ten, twenty shocks—between day and night—within the week; and for him not even the smallest vestige of any shock whatever. He could get no peace, and kept his ear to the instrument.

One day, behold! there passed the announcement of a scientific commission on its way to Pietranera in order to study these persistent seismic phenomena. A few days later he became aware of the transit of another despatch appointing the Pietranera telegraph-agent director of the Meteorologico-Seismic station, which the commission had thought it advisable to establish at that place. In a month from that time the speedy arrival of a large number of scientific instruments was wired down from headquarters.

Nino d’Arco could stand it no longer; nothing would serve but he must go and see with his own eyes what under the canopy that Meteorologico-Seismic Observatory could be which would not let him live in peace.

He could not recover from the astonishment into which he was thrown by the sight of all these machines already set up in position, whose strange names Pippo Corradi reeled off with the greatest ease, as he explained the working of each. Rain-gauge, wind-gauge, barometers, maximum and minimum thermometers, hygrometers, and besides that a tromometer, and all sorts of devilries for marking the very slightest shocks of earthquake, indicating their nature, and recording the very hour at which they occurred, by means of stop-watches.... Nino was very far from understanding it all, but made believe to do so; and, at last, he remained quite a time gazing through a magnifying-glass at the pendulum constructed to register the movements of the earthquake by marking them with a sharp point on a sheet of smoked glass placed beneath it.... The pendulum was at that moment moving, sometimes from right to left, sometimes backwards and forwards, but with so imperceptible a movement that it could not be discerned by the naked eye.... Suddenly—drin! drin!—there is a ringing of bells, the pendulum quivers....

“A shock!” And Pippo, triumphant, rushes to the telegraph instrument to announce it.

“I did not feel anything!” said Nino d’Arco, white with terror.

And he hastened to go. But he was simply knocked to pieces by all those machines and the satisfied air of his colleague. The latter already signed himself “Director of the Meteorologico-Seismic Observatory at Pietranera,” and seemed a great personage—reflected Nino—even to him, who knew very well who he was, a telegraph clerk just like himself!

All along the homeward road, when he had finished settling accounts with the ass, he ruminated over the hundreds of francs which all that apparatus must have cost.... The seismographic pendulum, however, was only worth eighteen.... He would like to have at least a pendulum.... What would he do with it when he had it? No one could tell; least of all himself. But the pendulum kept vibrating in his brain all the week, backwards and forwards, right and left, scratching the smoked glass at every stroke. Nino seemed to himself to be always standing behind the magnifying-glass, as he had done at Pietranera. It was a diabolical persecution!

He had to humble himself before his detested colleague, in order to get information, explanations and instruments; but after all, in the end, the pendulum was there in its place, near the office window. It had cost him nearly half his month’s salary. But what of that? Now, he too could telegraph the most beautiful earthquakes, on occasion.

But just look at the perversity of things! That infamous pendulum—as if on purpose to spite him—remained perfectly motionless, even if one looked at it through the magnifying-glass. Nino, who passed whole days ruining his eyes with that glass, anxious to observe the first trace of movement, so as to signal it, and thus begin his competition with the Pietranera observatory, ground his teeth with rage. Especially on the days when his fortunate rival seemed to be mocking him with the ticking of the messages which announced to the Provincial Office some little shock recorded by the instruments at Pietranera. For an earthquake—a real earthquake—Nino would have given, who can tell what? perhaps his very soul. In the meantime he dreamt of earthquakes, often awaking terrified in the night, uncertain whether it were a dream, or the shock had really taken place; but the pendulum remained stern and immovable. It was enough to drive the veriest saint desperate. Ah! Was that the game? Did the earthquakes obstinately refuse to manifest themselves? Well, he would invent them. After all, who could contradict him? And so that unlucky parish, which had been for centuries quietly anchored to the rocky mountain-side, began to perform in its turn—in the Reports of the Meteorological Office at Rome—an intricate dance of shocks, slight shocks, and approaches to shocks; there was no means of keeping it still any longer. And as Nino could not forego the glory of showing his friends the sheet where his name appeared in print beside those of several famous men of science, the report spread through the country that the mountain was moving, imperceptibly, and threatened to come down in a landslip.

“Is it really true?” the most timid came to ask.

“True, indeed!” replied Nino solemnly, and pointed to the pendulum; but he would allow no one to examine it at close quarters.

Just as though it had been done on purpose, the Pietranera observatory no longer signalled any disturbances since Golastretta had begun to amuse itself by frequent vibrations; and Pippo Corradi, suspecting the trick of his colleague, was gnawing his own heart out over all the false indications which were quietly being foisted in among the genuine ones of the official report, and making a mock of Science.

He, for his own part, did his work seriously and scrupulously, even leaving his dinner when the hour for observation came; and his reports might be called models of scientific accuracy. Ought he to denounce his colleague? to unmask him? He could not make up his mind. The latter, as bold as brass, went on making his village quake and tremble, as though it were nothing at all.

This time the proverb that “lies have short legs” did not hold good; for the lies in question reached Tacchini at Rome, and Father Denza at Moncalieri. Perhaps, even, they confused the calculations of those unfortunate scientists, who were very far from suspecting, in the remotest degree, the wickedness of Nino.

But one day, all of a sudden, the Golastretta pendulum awoke from its torpor, and began to move behind the magnifying-glass, although to the naked eye its motion was scarcely perceptible.

Nino gave a howl of joy. “At last! at last!”

To the first person who happened to come into the office he said, with a majestic sweep of the arm, “Look here!”

“What does it mean?”

“We shall have a big earthquake!” and he rubbed his hands.

“Mercy!”

The man, who had felt his head turning round with the continued agitation of the pendulum, and was struck with consternation to find that it could scarcely be perceived without the magnifier, rushed at once to spread the terrible news in streets, shops, and cafés. In an hour the telegraph office was invaded—besieged. Everybody wished to see with his or her own eyes, so as to be certain, and then take a resolution. And the people who had seen frightened the others with their accounts, exaggerating matters, giving explanations more terrifying than those they had received and half understood, and so increasing the panic, which now began to seize on the most sceptical spirits. An extraordinary success for Nino d’Arco! He seemed to see before him the image of his colleague, jaundiced with envy, and again rubbed his hands with delight. Outside, the street was full of people discussing the affair with comments. Women were crying, boys shouting, “Is it still moving?” “Worse than before.” “Oh! blessed Madonna!” The parish priest hastened to the spot, frightened as badly as the rest by the news which had been carried to him by the sacristan; and scarcely had he looked through the glass than he sprang from his chair as if he had felt the ground rocking under his feet.

“It is the judgment of God, gentlemen! On account of our sins, gentlemen!”

Then the people began to get away as fast as they could.

There was a banging of shutters, a hurried closing of doors, a rushing about, a shouting of each other’s names. “Is it still moving?” “Worse than ever!” So that at last Nino d’Arco himself no longer felt easy. And from time to time he turned back to look once more at the pendulum, which continued to vibrate. It was the first time that Nino found himself indeed, as it were, face to face with a distant indication of earthquake, after the hundred or so of shocks, of all sorts, strengths, and sizes, which he had invented and caused to be published in the Report at Rome. And now it was not exactly an amusing thing—that dumb menace, to which his ignorance gave a false significance. Pendulum of the devil! Would it never be still? A beautiful invention of science, calculated to kill a peaceful citizen with anticipatory fear! Who ever heard of the earth being shaken without people becoming aware of it?

It seemed to him that the vibrations increased from hour to hour, and that the danger of a general fall of buildings became more imminent every minute. He was alone in the office,—there was not a soul to be seen in the street,—every one had left the village, to seek safety in the open plain. And his duty, as telegraph operator, forbade him to move!

Towards evening he closed the office, and went out into the plain himself. The people were standing about in groups, telling their beads and chanting litanies. When they saw him they were near falling upon him, as the cause of the mischief. Was it not he who had turned the whole village upside down, with that accursed pendulum of his? The whole scene had a depressing effect on him, however much he might try to keep up his courage, and convince his fellow-townsmen of the great benefits of his warning, which might, for all they knew, have been the saving of many lives.

But at noon on the following day nothing had yet happened.

Every quarter of an hour some one of the bravest came in from the country to the telegraph office, to find out how things were going. The pendulum still vibrated—but there were no news of the predicted earthquake.

The evening came. Not the ghost of an earthquake! A few, here and there, began to turn the thing into ridicule. The syndic—who had a head on his shoulders—had sent a boy to the Pietranera. When the boy returned with Pippo Corradi’s answer, “It’s all nonsense—make your minds easy!” there was an explosion of “Oh!—oh!—oh!” and those who had been most frightened, and felt that they had been made fools of, began to yell, “Imbecile! Blockhead! Idiot!”

They rushed in a tumultuous noisy crowd to the telegraph office; and had they not met with the lieutenant of the Carbineers, who had hastened up on receipt of a cipher telegram from the chief constable, who knows how the matter might have ended for Nino d’Arco?

“What on earth have you been doing?” said the lieutenant. “You have been disturbing the public peace.”

Nino was petrified for a moment; then, seeking to excuse himself by proof positive, pointed to the pendulum.

“Well?” said the lieutenant.

“Look—it moves!”

“You must be seeing double. There is nothing moving here.”

“Do look carefully.”

“Allow me.... Nothing moving!”

In fact, the pendulum had stopped. Nino would not believe his own eyes.

“I confiscate it, for the present!” cried the lieutenant.

And, raising the glass of the case, he took out the tube in which the pendulum was fixed.

“When one is as ignorant as you, sir, ...” Every one present applauded vigorously. “And I shall report the matter to headquarters.”

To Nino it mattered nothing that the crowd should applaud and hiss, or that the lieutenant of the Carbineers should report him at headquarters. He was thinking only of Pippo Corradi, and how he would laugh behind his back when he heard it; and the tears stood in his eyes.

And, as though all this had not been enough, behold, on the following day, the following message clicked along the wires from Corradi:—

“To-day, 2 P.M., upward shock of first degree, lasting three seconds; followed, after interval of seven seconds, by undulatory shock, south-north, also first degree, lasting five seconds. No damage.”

“Infamous fate!” stammered Nino d’Arco. And he shut off the current, to escape from the clicks which seemed to deride him.

Luigi Capuana.

QUACQUARÀ.

Poor Don Mario! No sooner was he seen coming round the corner with his rusty, narrow-brimmed, stove-pipe hat, nearly a foot high, and his overcoat with long tails fluttering in the wind, than every one—first the boys, then the men, the loafers on Piazza Buglio, and even the gentlemen at the Casino—began to salute him, on every side, with the cry of the quail, “Quacquarà! Quacquarà!” just because they knew that it enraged him.

He stopped and stood at bay, staring round, brandishing his great cudgel, and shaking his head threateningly. Then he would take two or three steps forward, looking fixedly at them, in order to discover one or other of the impudent wretches who so far forgot the respect due to him, the son and grandson of lawyers—to him who stood a hundred times higher than all those gentlemen of the Casino.... But in vain! On the right hand and the left, before and behind, rose the shouts and whistles, “Quacquarà! Quacquarà!”

“Don’t excite yourself! Let them shout!”

“If I do not kill some one, they will never be quiet!”

“Do you want to go to the convict prison for nothing?”

“I will send them there!”

He became red as a turkey-cock, raving and gesticulating and foaming at the mouth.

“They would be quiet enough, if you did not get angry.”

“They are cowards! Why don’t they come out like men, and say it to my face?”

“Quacquarà!”——

“Ah! would you hit a child?” This time, if they had not stopped him, he would have broken the head of the barber’s boy, who had boldly approached him near enough to utter the objectionable cry under his very nose. There was trouble enough before Don Mario would let himself be dragged away into the chemist’s shop, which was filled with a laughing crowd. Vito, the chemist’s young man, came forward, very seriously, and said to him—

“What does it matter if they do say Quacquarà to you? You don’t happen to be a quail, do you?”

Don Mario turned furious eyes on him.

“Well; it’s not as if they called you a thief!”

“I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman.”

“Well? What does Quacquarà mean? Nothing at all. Quacquarà let it be!”

The chemist and the others present were writhing in convulsions of suppressed laughter at the serious countenance of Vito, who, under the pretext of lecturing Don Mario for his folly, kept on repeating the quail’s cry to his very face, without his perceiving that it was done on purpose.

“Now I,” said he, “if a man were to cry Quacquarà after me, I would give him a halfpenny every time. Quacquarà! Quacquarà! Shout yourselves hoarse, if you like!”

“And, meanwhile, you scoundrel, you’re repeating it to my face,” yelled Don Mario, as he raised his cudgel, perceiving at last that he had been made a fool of. At this point the chemist, who was terrified for the safety of his plate-glass windows, thought it time to interfere; and, taking his arm, drew him out of the shop, condoling with his grievances, and soothing his ruffled feelings as well as he could.

“Come out this way; no one will see you.”

“Am I to hide myself? To please those louts? I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman!”

True—very true! The Majori had always been respectable people, son succeeding father in the notary’s office from generation to generation, up to the year 1819; in which year there issued forth from the infernal regions that judgment of Heaven called the Code Napoléon, specially created for the despair of the notary Majori, Don Mario’s father, who never could understand it, and was forced to retire from his profession.

“What? No more Latin formulas?... And documents to be headed ‘In the King’s Name’! But what has his Majesty the King to do with private contracts?”

And he relieved his conscience by having no more to do with the whole business. And so the ink had dried up in the great brass inkstand in his office, and the quill pens were all worn out; and the quiet in the house contrasted strangely with the bustle there had been formerly, when every one came to consult him, for he was honesty in person, and never set down on the papers a single word more or less than the interested parties wished. And thus, Don Mario, who had hitherto acted as clerk in his father’s office, and knew by heart all the Latin formulas, without understanding a syllable thereof, found his occupation gone. So did his brother Don Ignazio, who was not much more capable than himself; and after the old notary had died of a broken heart, on account of that unholy Code which had no Latin formulas, and insisted on having documents headed In the King’s Name, the two brothers eked out a sordid livelihood on the little they inherited from him. But they were proud in their honourable poverty, and rigidly faithful to the past, even in their dress, continuing for a time to wear their old clothes, carefully brushed and mended, regardless of the fact that they were out of fashion and excited ridicule.

Don Ignazio, however, could not stand it long. When his beaver hat seemed to him quite useless, and his overcoat too threadbare, he bought a second-hand hat for a few pence from Don Saverio, the old-clothes dealer, and a coat which had also been worn already, but presented a better appearance than his old one. Don Mario, on the other hand, stood firm, and went about in his rusty tall hat and long coat of half a century ago, shabby and darned, but without a spot. He was not going to derogate from his past—he, the son and grandson of notaries.

Then came hard times,—bad harvests,—the epidemic of 1837,—the cholera,—the revolution of ’48;—and the two brothers passed disagreeable days and still more unpleasant nights, racking their brains for the means of procuring a glass of wine for the morrow, or a little oil for the salad or the soup.

“To-morrow I will go to So-and-so,” Don Mario would say. “Meanwhile we must sweep out the house.”

They did everything themselves; and while Don Ignazio cut up an onion to put into the evening’s salad, Don Mario, in his father’s indoor coat, all faded and mended, began carefully to sweep the rooms like a housemaid. He dusted the rickety tables and the old ragged, leather-covered arm-chairs; and then, having gathered up all the dirt into a basket, he would cautiously open the door, to make sure there was no one within sight, and, late at night, carried it out and deposited it behind the wall of a ruined house which had become the dust-bin of the neighbourhood.

And on the way he would pick up stones, cabbage-stumps, bits of orange or pumpkin-peel, so as to clean up the street also, seeing that no one troubled about it, every one being too much occupied with his or her own business to pay any attention to cleanliness. Cleanliness was his fixed idea—indoors and out. It often happened that Don Ignazio, finding that he was late in coming home, was forced to go out and call him in to supper.

“You are not the public scavenger, are you?”

“Cleanliness is a commandment of the Lord!” Don Mario would reply.

And, having washed his hands, he sat down to the meagre supper of onion salad and bread as if it had been the daintiest of dishes.

“This is Donna Rosa’s oil; and do you know there is no more left?” said Don Ignazio one evening between two mouthfuls.

“To-morrow I will go to the Cavaliere!”

“But his father was a peasant farmer!”

“His grandfather was a day labourer!”

“And now he is made of money!”

“His grandfather became the Prince’s agent—and made his fortune.”

“Let us go to bed; the light is going out.”

They had to economise even their candles. But afterwards, in the dark, the interrupted conversation was continued—not very consecutively—from one bed to another.

“Have you seen the band in their new uniforms?”

“Yes.... Farmer Cola has got in a hundred bushels of grain this year.”

“Who knows if it is true? Much good may it do him!”

“To-morrow I will go to the Cavaliere for some oil.”...

“The wine is all gone, too.”

“I will go for the wine as well.... Ave Maria!”

“Pater Noster!” And so they went to sleep.

In the morning, after carefully brushing his shabby and much-mended coat and his rusty hat, Don Mario dressed hastily and began his day by going to mass at San Francesco.... This ceremony over, he proceeded on his errand, hugging the oil-flask tightly under his coat.

He presented himself with humble and ceremonious courtesy.

“Is the Cavaliere at home?”

“No, but his lady is.”

“Announce me to the lady.”

Now all the domestics in the place knew perfectly well the meaning of a visit from Don Mario, and at most houses they would leave him to wait in the anteroom, or say to him without more ado—

“Give me the bottle, Don Mario.”

It often happened that while they were filling it for him he could not control himself at the sight of the disorder in the room where they left him. He would mount a chair in order to remove, with the end of his stick, the cobwebs clustering on the ceiling; and if he found a broom within reach of his hand—what was to be done? he could not resist!—he began to sweep the floor, to dust the pictures, or to pick up the scraps of paper or stuff scattered about.

“What are you doing, Don Mario?”

“The Lord has commanded us to be clean.... Thank the lady for me!”

Donna Rosa, who was amused with him and his ways, always had him shown up to the drawing-room, and asked him to sit down.

“How are you, dear Don Mario?”

“Well, thank God. And how is your Excellency?”

“As well as most old women, dear Don Mario!”

“None are old but those that die. Your Excellency is so charitable, that you ought to be spared for a hundred years to come.”

Donna Rosa kept up the conversation as though she had no idea of the real object of this visit; and Don Mario, still hugging his bottle, awaited the favourable moment for presenting his request without appearing troublesome. From time to time, after wriggling on his chair, as if in pain, for a few minutes, he would rise, and with “Excuse me, my lady!” wipe the dust from a table, or stoop to pick up a flake of wool, or bit of thread from the floor, and throw it out of the window,—as though the sight of these things actually made him feel ill.

“Oh! never mind, Don Mario!”

“The Lord has commanded us to be clean.... I had come....”

“How does your brother like his new employment?” Donna Rosa interrupted him, one day.

“Very much indeed.”

“You ought to try and get appointed inspector of weights yourself. There is one wanted at the Archi mill.”

“But the addition, madam! the addition! Ignazio knows how to do it!”

He turned up his eyes, with a sigh—as if this arithmetical process were a most complicated calculation.

“Poor Ignazio!” he went on. “He comes back from the mill so tired! Just imagine, madam—four miles uphill, on foot!... I had come for this....”

And he produced the flask.

“With pleasure!” Who was there that could say “No” to Don Mario?

But when that unfortunate addition was mentioned, not even the gift of a bottle of wine could restore him to good humour. He had tried so many times to do an addition sum. The tens were the difficulty.

“Nine and one are ten.... Very good!... But ... put down nought and carry one.... Why carry one if there are ten?”

He had found it utterly impossible to understand this. And yet he was no fool. You should have heard him read, quite correctly, all those old legal documents, with their strange Latin abbreviations, which the modern notaries and advocates could not succeed in deciphering. It is true that he recited them parrot-fashion, without understanding them; but all the same he could earn half a franc at a time when required for this service; and this meant two litres of wine and half a kilo of lamb—quite a festive meal, although, nowadays, with Don Ignazio’s position, the two brothers were not quite so badly off as before.

They would even have been happy if it had not been for the irritating behaviour of the street boys. One day matters reached a crisis. Don Mario, administering a cuff to an ill-conditioned fellow who assaulted him with the cry of Quacquarà, received the same back with interest, and got his coat torn into the bargain. The magistrate, before whom the case was brought, kept the vagabond under arrest for a couple of hours, and got up a subscription at the Casino, to present Don Mario with a new coat and hat. But the latter would never consent to be measured for it, and when the coat—cut out by guess-work—was sent him, together with the most spick and span of hats, he thanked the donors politely, and sent the whole back.

“You have been a fool!” said his brother, who, on his return from the mill that evening, found him intent on repairing his ancient garment. “You can’t go out again in that.”

“I shall stay at home,” replied Don Mario loftily.

And he was no longer seen about the town.

He passed his days sitting on the front doorstep, talking to the neighbours, or wandering through the many empty rooms of the dilapidated house. No repairs had been undertaken for years past; the shutters were loose on their hinges. Two floors had given way, and had to be passed by means of planks, laid like bridges from one room to another; and the tiles were off the roof in many places, so that some of the upper rooms were flooded when it rained.

“Sell half the house,” said one of the neighbours; “it is much too large for you two alone!”

But that evening, discussing the matter at supper, Don Mario and Don Ignazio found themselves greatly embarrassed.

“Sell! Easily said.... But what? The room that had been their father’s office?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Don Mario indignantly.

It is true that the big volumes, bound in dark leather, were no longer in the shelves all round the walls. The government had taken possession of them, as though they had been its property, and not that of the notaries, who had drawn up all those documents. But what matter? The shelves, moth-eaten and rickety, reduced to receptacles for dishes, frying-pans, and utensils of all sorts, remained, to their eyes, living witnesses, as it were, to past glories. The two brothers looked at one another.

“Was it possible?... Well.... What should they sell? Their grandmother’s room?”

A mysterious chamber, which had been kept locked for seventy years, and of which now even the key was lost. Their grandfather’s wife—a saint on earth—had died there, and the widower had ordered it to be shut up, in sign of perpetual mourning. Every night the mice kept up a terrible racket there. But what matter? A master notary—one of the Majori—had willed that no one should open it and no one had done so. Were they to profane it? They were both agreed ... it was impossible!

“What then? The portrait-room?”

There were arranged on its walls half-a-dozen canvases, blackened with years and smoke, on which you could make out—here, the severe profile of Don Gasparo Majori, 1592; there, the grey eyes, white moustache, and pointed beard of Don Carlo, 1690; beside it, the wig and round shaven face of Don Paolo, 1687; and further on, the lean and narrow head of Don Antonio, 1805, framed in an enormous collar, with white neckcloth, and showy waistcoat with watch-chain and seals dangling from its pockets. Don Mario knew by heart the life, death, and miracles of each one, and so did Don Ignazio.

Could they turn them out of their own house? No; it was impossible. Better let the whole fall into ruins.

They went to bed and put out the light.

“Well, it will last our time. We are old, Mario!”

“You are two years older than I!”

“... To-morrow, Notary Patrizio is coming to get an old deed read out to him.”

“So we shall be able to buy half a kilo of meat.”

“Saverio the butcher cheats in his weights. I shall keep my eyes open.”

“I have lent the rolling-pin to Comare Nina.”

“I will get the wine from Scatá.... Vittoria wine this time.... Pater Noster!”

“Ave Maria!”

So they went to sleep.

They were growing old. Ignazio was right.

Don Mario sometimes wondered which of the two would die first, and the thought left him sad and depressed.

“I am the younger.... But, after me, the house will go to distant relatives, ... they will divide it up and sell it.... But, after all, what does it matter to us? We shall both be gone then.... We are the real Majori; when we are dead, the world is dead!”

Yet he went on sweeping out the tumble-down old house with the same tenderness and care as ever, removing the cobwebs from the walls, and dusting the moth-eaten and ragged remnants of furniture; driving a nail into the back of a chair or the leg of a table; pasting a sheet of oiled paper in the place of a missing window-pane, and carrying out the dust and rubbish as usual, late at night.

Moreover, since he now frequently went to sleep in the daytime—with the loneliness, and having nothing to do—he sometimes passed the night out of doors, sweeping the whole length and breadth of the street, and pleased to hear the wonder of the neighbourhood next morning, and have people say to him—

“The angel passed by last night. Is it so, Don Mario?”

He would smile, without replying. He was now quite resigned to his voluntary imprisonment, as he could no longer wear his old coat and hat, which were still there, quite spotless and free from dust, though perfectly useless.

One day, however, Don Mario lost all his peace of mind.

Standing at a window in the portrait-room, he had been looking along the street at Reina’s house, with its fantastically-sculptured gateway and the twisted stone monsters.

“A fine palace—quite a royal one,” said Don Mario, who had never seen anything richer or more beautiful in his life.

“Yet, how was it the proprietor had never noticed those tufts of pellitory growing between the carvings over the arch of the great gateway, quite spoiling the building? It was a sin and a shame!”

Scarcely had Don Ignazio come home from the mill that evening, tired and out of breath, when his brother said to him—

“Look here; you ought to go to Signor Reina. He is letting nasty weeds grow between the carvings of the gateway, under the middle balcony. It quite worries one to see them.”

“Well?”

“You ought to tell him of it—at least when you meet him again.”

“I will tell him.”

Don Ignazio, quite worn out with his long walk, had other matters to think of; he wanted to have his supper and go to bed.

But from that day he too got no peace. Every evening, when he came home, Don Mario never failed to ask him, even before he had laid aside his stick: “Have you spoken to Reina?”

“No.”

“Go and tell him at once. It is a pity; those weeds are spoiling the building.”

They were quite an eyesore to him; he could not make out how Reina could put up with such a sacrilege. And several times a day he would go to the attic window, mounting a pair of steps at the risk of his neck, in order to look out. Those weeds were always there! They grew from day to day; they made great bushes that waved in the wind. If they had been fungous growths in the interior of his own system, he could not have suffered more from them.

“Have you told Reina about them?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He swore at me.”

That night Don Mario never closed his eyes. As soon as he found that his brother was snoring, then he lit the lamp, dressed himself, took the steps on his shoulder, which they nearly dislocated, and made his way to Reina’s house, keeping in the shadow of the wall, and avoiding the moonlight, as if he had been a burglar.

As indeed the gendarmes thought him when they came upon him, perched on the top of the gateway, pulling away for dear life at the parasitic herbs, in spite of the proprietor, who did not care whether they grew there or not.

“What are you doing up there?”

“I am pulling out these weeds.”

“Come down.”

“Let me finish.”

“Come down, I tell you!”

At this unceremonious summons poor Don Mario had to descend, leaving several bushes of pellitory to spoil the beautiful building unchecked....

They were nearly taking him off to the police station!... And all for a good action! He died within three months, with the nightmare of those weeds weighing on his heart.... Poor old Don Mario!

Luigi Capuana.

THE EXCAVATIONS OF MASTRO ROCCO.

Ever since he had taken it into his head to “take off the charm,” in the Grotto of the Seven Gates, Mastro Rocco had given up his pork-butcher’s shop, and was always on the top of the hill, baking his hump-back in the sun, digging here and there from morning to night, to find some trace of the treasure which the Saracens had enchanted in that neighbourhood.

Mastro Rocco used to talk as though he had seen it with his little red-rimmed eyes, and touched it with the horny hands which now wielded the spade both day and night, excavating ancient tombs,—by day on his own little plot of ground which looked like the destruction of Jerusalem—all yawning holes and heaps of earth;—by night, on his neighbours’ farms, by moonlight, or by that of a lantern, when there was no moon; for the neighbours did not like their ground cut up, and laughed at his finds of useless earthen vessels, and old coins with which you could not even buy a pennyworth of bread.

Mastro Rocco laughed to himself at these ignorant rustics who understood nothing. He knew, and had proved it, that those earthen vases, especially if they had figures on them, and that oxidised money, could be speedily converted into good coin of the realm, when he carried them to Baron Padullo, who put on his spectacles to examine them, and then opened certain huge books, as big as missals, and full of pictures, to make comparisons. Thus he had become convinced that the trade of selling ham and sausages was far inferior to that of digging up antiquities....

---

One day he found some beautiful terra-cotta figures, for which the baron paid him ten scudi. Who could tell what they might be worth, when the old gentleman could bring himself to give as much as that.

After that he went much more frequently to the baron’s house, accompanied by a little old man, whom Mastro Rocco called his assistant. But they always brought figures exactly like the first ones, all soiled with the earth they had been dug from; and at last, one day, the baron said—

“Mastro Rocco, if you do not find something different, you might as well save yourself the trouble of coming. Look here, I have a whole cupboard full of these.”

He pointed to a number of statuettes of Ceres, seated with her hands on her knees, arranged in rows behind the glass doors, along with Greek vases, lamps, bronzes of every sort, and antique coins of every size....

It was a long time before Mastro Rocco was seen again at the baron’s. When he next presented himself, along with the little old man, he carefully set down a basket full of hay which he had carried up under his arm, and began to gesticulate vehemently as he pointed out the precious objects reposing in the basket and covered with the hay.

“Ah! signor barone! what a novelty! what a novelty! Your worship will be enchanted, upon my word of honour!”

The baron had put on his spectacles in order the better to admire; and when he saw some half-dozen figures of Ceres, exactly like the others, but with unmistakable pipes in their mouths, instead of being enchanted, he roared aloud—

“Ah! Mastro Rocco, you thief! Ah! you scoundrel!”

And he would have put a pistol-bullet through the head of each if they had not jumped from the window regardless of possible broken necks; though, after all, it was not very high. Mastro Rocco only broke his arm, and had a mass said to his patron saint for assistance rendered in this extremity. With his arm in a sling he imprecated curses on his rascally partner, who had suggested the charming novelty of the pipes!

“Was it not enough to have imitated the form of the little idols well enough to take in even Baron Padullo?”

Luigi Capuana.

THE WAR OF THE SAINTS.

All of a sudden, while San Rocco was quietly proceeding on his way, under his baldachin, with a number of wax candles lit all round him, and the band, and the procession, and the crowd of devout people—there came to pass a general helter-skelter, tumult, and confusion worse confounded. There were priests running away, with the skirts of their cassocks flying wildly, drummers and fifers upset on their faces, women screaming, blood flowing in streams, and cudgels playing even under the very nose of the blessed San Rocco. The Prætor, the Syndic, the Carbineers all hastened to the spot;—the broken bones were carried off to the hospital,—a few of the more riotous members of the community were marched off to pass the night in prison,—the saint returned to his church at a run rather than a processional step,—and the festival ended like the comedies of Pulcinella.

And all this through the spite of the people in the parish of San Pasquale. That year the pious souls of San Rocco had been spending the very eyes out of their heads in order to do things in grand style;—they had sent for the band from town,—they had let off more than two thousand squibs,—and they had now got a new banner, all embroidered with gold, which, it was said, weighed over a quintal, and tossed up and down in the midst of the crowd, like a wave crested with golden foam. Which thing, by sheer contrivance of the Evil One, was a thorn in the sides of the followers of S. Pasquale,—so that one of the latter at last lost patience, and began, pale as death, to yell at the top of his voice, “Viva San Pasquale!” Then it was that the cudgels began to fly.

Because, after all, to go and cry “Viva San Pasquale” in the very face of San Rocco, is really a good, sound, indisputable provocation;—it is just like going and spitting in a man’s house, or amusing yourself by pinching the girl who is walking arm in arm with him. In such a case there is no longer any sense of right and wrong,—and that slight amount of respect which people still have for the other saints—who, after all, are all related to each other—is trampled under foot. If it happens in church, seats are flung into the air,—if during a procession, there are showers of torch stumps like swarms of bats, and at table the dishes fly.

“Santo diavolone!” cried Compare Nino, panting, heated, and dishevelled. “I’d like to know who has the face to cry Viva San Pasquale again!”

“I!” yelled Turi the tanner, who looked forward to being his brother-in-law, quite beside himself with rage, and nearly blinded by a chance blow received in the mêlée. “Viva San Pasquale till death!”

“For the love of Heaven! for the love of Heaven!” shrieked his sister Saridda, throwing herself between her brother and her betrothed. All three had been going for a walk in all love and good fellowship up to that moment.

Compare Nino, the expectant bridegroom, kept crying in derision, “Long live my boots—viva San Stivale!”

“Take that!” howled Turi, foaming at the mouth, his eyes swollen and his face like a tomato. “Take that for San Rocco, you and your boots! There!”

In this way they exchanged blows which would have felled an ox, till their friends succeeded in separating them by dint of cuffs and kicks. Saridda, who by this time had grown excited on her own account, now cried Viva San Pasquale, and was very nearly coming to blows with her lover, as if they had already been husband and wife.

At such times parents quarrel most desperately with their sons and daughters, and wives separate from their husbands, if by misfortune a woman of the parish of San Pasquale has married a man from San Rocco.

“I won’t hear another word about that man!” cried Saridda, standing with her hands on her hips, to the neighbours, when they asked her how it happened that the marriage had not come off. “I won’t have him, if they give him to me dressed in gold and silver from head to foot! Do you hear?”

“Saridda may stay where she is till she turns mouldy, for all I care!” said Compare Nino, in his turn, as he was getting the blood washed from his face at the public-house. “A parcel of beggars and cowards, over in the tanner’s quarter! I must have been drunk when it came into my head to look for a sweetheart over there!”

“Since it is this way,” had been the Syndic’s conclusion, “and they can’t carry a saint out into the square without sticks and fighting, so that it’s perfectly beastly,—I will have no more festivals, nor processions, nor services; and if they bring out so much as one single candle—what you may call a candle—I’ll have them every one in gaol.”

In time, the matter became important; for the bishop of the diocese had granted to the priests of San Pasquale the privilege of wearing copes. The parishioners of San Rocco, whose priests had no copes, had even gone to Rome to raise an outcry at the foot of the Holy Father, carrying with them documents on stamped paper, and everything else; but all had been in vain, for their adversaries of the lower town—who, as every one remembered, had once been without shoes to their feet—had now grown as rich as Jews, through this new industry of tanning. And, in this world, one knows that justice is bought and sold like the soul of Judas.

At San Pasquale they were awaiting Monsignor’s delegate, who was a person of importance, and had silver buckles on his shoes weighing half a pound apiece—and a fine sight they were to see—and he was coming to bring the copes to the canons. And for this reason, they, in their turn, had now sent for the band, and they were going to meet Monsignor’s delegate three miles outside the town; and it was said that in the evening there were to be fireworks in the square, with Viva San Pasquale over and over again, in letters as big as those on a shop-front.

The inhabitants of the upper town were therefore in a great ferment; and some, more excited than others, were trimming certain staves of pear and cherry wood, as big as clothes-props, and muttering—

“If there is to be music, we shall want to beat time!”

The Bishop’s delegate ran a great risk of coming out of his triumphal entry with broken bones. But the reverend gentleman was cunning enough to leave the band waiting for him outside the town, while he, taking a short cut, quietly walked to the parish priest’s house, whither he summoned the principal men of the two parties.

When these gentlemen found themselves face to face—after all this time that the feud had lasted—each man began to look into the whites of his neighbour’s eyes, as if he could scarcely keep his nails out of them; and it required all the authority of his Reverence—who had put on his new cloth soutane for the occasion—to get the ices and the other refreshments served without accidents.

“That’s right!” said the Syndic approvingly, with his nose in his glass. “When you want me for the cause of peace, you’ll always find me on the spot.”

The delegate, in fact, said that he had come for the sake of conciliation, with the olive-branch in his mouth, like Noah’s dove, and made his exhortation, distributing smiles and hand-clasps all round, and saying, “Gentlemen, will you do me the favour of coming into the sacristy to take a cup of chocolate on the day of the festival?”

“Do leave the festival alone!” said the Vice-Prætor; “if not, more mischief will come of it.”

“Mischief will come of it if this tyranny is to be allowed—if a man is not to be free to amuse himself as he likes, and pay for it with his own money!” exclaimed Bruno, the carter.

“I wash my hands of the matter. The orders of the Government are explicit. If you celebrate the festival I shall send for the Carbineers. I am for order.”

“I will answer for order!” said the Syndic, tapping the ground for emphasis with his umbrella, and looking slowly around.

“Bravo! as if we did not know that it is your brother-in-law Bruno who blows the bellows for you in the Town Council!” retorted the Vice-Prætor.

“And you have joined the opposition party only on account of that bye-law about the washing, which you can’t get over!”

“Gentlemen! gentlemen!” entreated the delegate. “We shall do nothing if we go on in this way.”

“We’ll have a revolution, that we will!” shouted Bruno, gesticulating with his hands in the air.

Fortunately the parish priest had quietly put away the cups and glasses, and the sacristan had rushed off at the top of his speed to dismiss the band, who, having heard of the delegate’s arrival, were already hastening up to welcome him, blowing their cornets and clarionets.

“In this way we shall do nothing at all!” muttered the delegate, worried to death by the thought that the harvest was already ripe for cutting in his own village, while he was wasting his time here talking to Compare Bruno and the Vice-Prætor, who were ready to tear one another’s souls out. “What is this story about the prohibition of the washing?”

“The usual interference. Nowadays one can’t hang a handkerchief out of the window to dry without getting fined for it. The Vice-Prætor’s wife—feeling safe because her husband was in a position of trust, for till now people always had some little regard for the authorities—used to hang out the whole week’s washing—it was not much to boast of—on the terrace.... But now, under the new law, that’s a mortal sin; and now even the dogs and fowls are prohibited, and the other animals[^[12]]—saving your presence—that used to do the scavenging in the streets; and now the first rain that comes it will be Heaven’s mercy if we don’t all get smothered in the filth. The real truth is that Bruno, the assessor, has a grudge against the Vice-Prætor, on account of a certain decision he has given against him.”

The delegate, in order to conciliate the local mind, used to sit boxed up in his confessional, like an owl in its nest, from morning till evening, and all the women were eager to be shriven by the Bishop’s representative, who had powers of plenary absolution for all sorts of sins, just as though he had been Monsignor in person.

“Your Reverence,” said Saridda, with her nose at the grating, “Compare Nino makes me commit sin every Sunday in church.”

“In what way, my daughter?”

“He was to have married me, before there was all this talk in the place; but now that the marriage is broken off, he goes and stands near the high altar, and stares at me, and laughs with his friends, all the time holy mass is going on.”

And when his Reverence tried to touch Nino’s heart the countryman replied—

“No, it is she who turns her back on me whenever she sees me—just as if I were a beggar!”

He, on the other hand, if Gnà Saridda passed across the square on Sundays, gave himself airs as if he had been the brigadier, or some other great personage, and did not even seem to see her. Saridda was exceedingly busy preparing little coloured paper-lanterns, and put them out in a row on the window-sill, in his very face, under the pretext of hanging them out to dry. Once they found themselves together in church, at a christening, and took no notice of each other, just as though they had never met before; nay, Saridda even Went so far as to flirt with the godfather.

“A poor sort of a godfather!” sneered Nino. “Why the child’s a girl! And when a girl is born, even the beams of the roof break down!”

Saridda turned away, and pretended to be talking to the baby’s mother.

“What’s bad does not always come to do harm. Sometimes, when you think you’ve lost a treasure, you ought to thank God and St. Pasquale; for you can never say you know a person till you have eaten seven measures of salt.”

“After all, one must take troubles as they come, and the worst possible way is to worry one’s self about things which are not worth the trouble. When one Pope’s dead they make another.”

“It’s fore-ordained what sort of natures children are to be born with, and it’s just like that with marriages. It’s far better to marry a man who really cares for you and has no other ends to serve, even though he has no money or fields, or mules or anything.”...

On the square the drum was beating to give notice of the festival.

“The Syndic says we shall have the festival,” was the murmur that went through the crowd.

“I’ll go to law till doomsday, if it should leave me as poor as holy Job, with nothing left but my shirt; but that five francs’ fine I will not pay! not if I had to leave directions about it in my will!”

“Confound it all!” exclaimed Nino. “What sort of a festival are they going to have, if we are all to die of hunger this year?”

Since March not a drop of rain had fallen, and the yellow corn, which crackled like tinder, was “dying of thirst.” Bruno, the carter, however, said that when San Pasquale was carried out in procession it would rain for certain. But what did he care about rain? or all the tanners of his neighbourhood either? In fact they carried San Pasquale in procession to east and to west, and set him upon a hill to bless the country on a stifling May day, when the sky was covered with clouds,—one of those days when the farmers are ready to tear their hair before the burnt-up fields, and the ears of corn droop as if they were dying.

“A curse on San Pasquale!” cried Nino, spitting in the air, and rushing about among his crops like a madman. “You have ruined me, San Pasquale; you’ve left me nothing but the reaping-hook to cut my throat with!”

The upper town was a desolate place enough. It was one of those long years when the hunger begins in June, and the women stand at their doors with their hair hanging about their shoulders—doing nothing—staring with fixed eyes. Gnà Saridda, hearing that Compare Nino’s mule was to be sold in the public square, to pay the rent of his farm, felt her anger melt away in an instant, and sent her brother Turi in hot haste, with the few soldi they had put aside, to help him.

Nino was in one corner of the square, with his eyes averted and his hands in his pockets, while they were selling his mule, with all its ornaments and the new headstall.

“I don’t want anything,” he replied sullenly. “My arms are still left me, please God. A fine saint that San Pasquale of yours, eh?”

Turi turned his back on him, to avoid unpleasantness, and went on his way. But the truth is that people’s minds were thoroughly exasperated, now that they had carried San Pasquale in procession to east and west, with no more result than that. The worst of it was that many from the parish of San Rocco had been induced to walk with the procession too, thrashing themselves like asses, and with crowns of thorns on their heads, for the sake of their crops. Now they relieved their feelings in exceedingly bad language; and the Bishop’s delegate was obliged to leave the town, as he entered it, on foot, and without the band.

The vice-prætor, by way of retaliation on his opponent, telegraphed that people’s minds were excited, and the public peace compromised; so that one fine day a report went through the town, that the soldiers had arrived, and every one could go and see them.

“They have come on account of the cholera,” others; said, however. “Down in the city, they say, the people are dying like flies.”

The chemist put up the chain of his shop door, and the doctor left the place as speedily as possible, to escape being knocked on the head.[^[13]]

“It will not come to anything,” said the few who had remained in the place, having been unable to fly into the country like the rest. “The blessed San Rocco will watch over his own town.”

Even the lower town folks had begun to go barefoot to San Rocco’s church. But not long after that, deaths began to come thick and fast. They said of one man that he was a glutton, and died of eating too many prickly pears, and of another, that he had come in from the country after nightfall.[^[14]] But, in short, there was the cholera, there was no disguising it,—in spite of the soldiers, and in the very teeth of San Rocco,—notwithstanding the fact that an old woman in the odour of sanctity had dreamed that the saint himself had said to her—

“Have no fear of the cholera, for I am looking after that. I am not like that useless old ass of a San Pasquale.”

Nino and Turi had not met since the mule was sold; but scarcely had the former heard that the brother and sister were both ill, than he hastened to their house, and found Saridda, black in the face, and her features all distorted, in a corner of the room. Her brother, who was with her, was recovering, but could not tell what to do for her, and was nearly beside himself with despair.

“Ah! thief of a San Rocco,” groaned Nino. “I never expected this. Gnà Saridda, don’t you know me any more? Nino, your old friend Nino.”

Saridda looked at him with eyes so sunken that one had to hold a lantern to her face before one could see them, and Nino felt his own running over.

“Ah! San Rocco,” said he, “this is a worse trick than the one San Pasquale played me!”

However, Saridda in time got better, and as she was standing at the door, with her head tied up in a handkerchief, and her face yellow as new wax, she said to Nino—

“San Rocco has worked a miracle for me, and you ought to come too, and carry a candle at his festival.”

Nino’s heart was too full to speak, and he nodded assent. But before the festival came round, he too was taken with the pestilence, and lay at the point of death. Saridda tore her face with her nails, and said that she wanted to die with him, and she would cut off her hair and have it buried with him, and no one should ever look her in the face again as long as she lived.

“No, no,” replied Nino, his face all drawn with agony. “Your hair will grow again, but it will be I that will never see you again, for I shall be dead.”

“A fine miracle that San Rocco has worked for you!” said Turi, by way of comforting him.

Both of them slowly recovered; and when they sat sunning themselves, with their backs to the wall and very long faces, kept throwing San Rocco and San Pasquale in each other’s teeth.

One day Bruno, the carter, coming back from the country after the cholera was over, passed by them, and said—

“We’re going to have a grand festival to thank San Pasquale for having saved us from the cholera. We shall have no more demagogues and no more opposition, now, that the vice-prætor is dead. He has left the quarrel behind him in his will.”

“All very well; a festival for the dead!” sneered Nino.

“Perhaps it was San Rocco that kept you alive?”

“There!—do have done with it!” cried Saridda. “If you don’t, we shall need another cholera to make peace between you!”

Giovanni Verga.

HIS REVERENCE.

He no longer went about now with the long beard and scapulary of the begging friar. He got shaved every Sunday, and went for a walk in his best soutane of fine cloth, with his silk-lined cloak over his arm. When he looked at his fields, his vineyards, his cattle, and his ploughmen, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth, if he had remembered the time when he washed up the dishes for the Capuchin fathers, and they put him into the frock out of charity, he would have crossed himself with his left hand.

But if they had not taught him, for charity’s sake, to read and write and say mass, he would never have succeeded in fixing himself in the best property in the village, nor in getting into his books the names of all those tenants who worked away and prayed for a good harvest for him, and then blasphemed like Turks when settling-day came round. “Look at what I am, and don’t ask who my parents were,” says the proverb. As for his parents, every one knew about them; his mother swept out the house for him. His Reverence was not ashamed of his family—not he; and when he went to play at cards with the Baroness, he made his brother wait for him in the anteroom, with the big lantern to light him home with.... He was popular as a confessor, and always ready for a little paternal gossip with his female penitents, after they had relieved their consciences and emptied their pockets, of their own and other people’s sins. You could always pick up some useful information, especially if you were given to speculating in agricultural matters, in return for your blessing!

Good gracious! He did not pretend to be a saint—not he! Holy men usually died of hunger—like the vicar, who celebrated, even when his masses were not paid for, and went about poor people’s houses in a ragged soutane which was a perfect scandal to religion. His Reverence wanted to get on, and get on he did, with the wind right aft, though a little hampered at first by that unlucky monk’s frock, which would get in his way, till he escaped from it by means of a suit before the Royal Courts. The rest of the brethren backed him up in his application, only for the sake of getting rid of him; for, as long as he was in the monastery, there was a free fight in the refectory every time a new Provincial had to be elected, and the forms and dishes flew about with such goodwill that Father Battistino, who was sturdy as a muleteer, had been half-killed, and Father Giammaria, the guardian, had had his teeth knocked down his throat. His Reverence, after having stirred up the fire all he could, always retired to his cell on those occasions, and remained quiet there; and it was in this way that he had succeeded in becoming “His Reverence” with a complete set of teeth, which served him exceedingly well; while of Father Giammaria, who had been the man to get that scorpion up his sleeve, every one said: “Serves him right!”

And Father Giammaria was still only guardian of the Capuchins, without a shirt to his back or a sou in his pocket,—hearing confessions for the love of God, and making soup for the poor.

When his Reverence was a boy, and saw his brother—the one who now carried the lantern—breaking his back with digging, and his sisters finding no husbands who would take them even at a gift, and his mother spinning in the dark to save lamp-oil, he said, “I want to be a priest.” His family sold their mule and their little plot of ground to send him to school, in the hope that if ever they attained to having a priest in the house, they would get something better than the land and the mule. But more than that was required to keep him at the seminary. Then the boy began to hang about the monastery, hoping to be taken on as a novice; and one day when the Provincial was expected, and they were busy in the kitchen, they called him in to help. Father Giammaria, a kind-hearted old fellow, said to him, “Would you like to stay here?—so you shall.” And Fra Carmelo, the porter—who was bored to death, sitting for hours on the cloister wall, with nothing to do, swinging one sandal against the other—patched him up a scapulary out of old rags which had been hung out on the fig-tree to scare away the sparrows. His mother, his brother, and sister protested that if he became a monk it was all up with them—they would lose the money they had paid for his schooling, and never get a brass farthing out of him in return. But he shrugged his shoulders and replied, “It’s a fine thing if a man is not to follow the vocation to which God has called him.”

Father Giammaria had taken a fancy to him because he was active and handy in the kitchen, and at all other work; and served mass as though he had never done anything else in his life, with his eyes cast down, and his lips primmed up like a seraph. Now that he no longer served the mass, he still had the same downcast eye and compressed lips, when it was a question of some scandal among the gentry, or of the common lands being put up to auction, or of swearing the truth before the magistrate.

No one dared to go to law with him; and if he cast his eyes on a farm for sale, or on a lot of the common land up at auction, the magnates of the place themselves, if they ventured to bid against him, did so with obsequious bows, offering him pinches of snuff. One day he and no less a person than the Baron himself were at it a whole day—pull devil, pull baker. The Baron was doing the amiable, and his Reverence, seated opposite to him, with his cloak gathered up between his legs, at every advance in the bidding offered him his silver snuff-box, sighing, “What are you going to do about it, Baron?” At last the lot was knocked down to him, and the Baron took his pinch of snuff, green with vexation.

This sort of thing quite met the views of the peasants; they were used to seeing the big dogs fight among themselves over a good bone, and leave nothing for the little ones to gnaw. But what made them complain was that this man of God ground them down worse than the very Antichrist, when they had to share the crops with him; and he had no scruples about seizing his neighbour’s goods, because the apparatus of the confessional was all in his hands, and if he fell into mortal sin he could easily give himself absolution. “It is everything to have the priest in one’s own house,” they sighed. And the shrewdest of them denied themselves the very bread out of their mouths, so as to send one of their sons to the seminary.

“When one gives himself up to the land, one has to do it altogether,” his Reverence used to say, as an excuse for considering no one. The mass itself he only celebrated on Sundays, except when there was nothing else to do; he was not one of those wretched starveling priests who have to run after the three tari of the mass fee. He had no need of it. So much so that the Bishop, arriving at his house on a pastoral visit, and finding his breviary covered with dust, wrote thereon with his finger, “Deo gratias!” But his Reverence had other things to think of besides wasting his time in reading the breviary, and laughed at the Bishop’s reproof. If the breviary was covered with dust, his oxen were sleek and shining, his sheep were thick in fleece, and the crops as tall as a man, so that his tenants, at any rate, could enjoy the sight of them, and build fine castles in the air—till they had to settle accounts with their landlord. It was a relief to their hearts, poor souls. “Crops that are like witchcraft! The Lord must have passed by them in the night! One can see that they belong to a man of God, and it is a good thing to work for him who has the mass and the blessing in his hand!” In May, at the season when they watched the sky with anxious looks for every passing cloud, they knew that their landlord was saying mass for the harvest, and was a better protection against the Evil Eye and the bad season than pictures of saints or blessed loaves. As for the latter, his Reverence would not have them scattered about among the crops, because, as he said, they only served to attract sparrows and other noxious birds. Of sacred pictures he had his pockets full; he got as many as he wanted, of the best kind, in the sacristy, without spending a penny, and made presents of them to his labourers.

But at harvest-time he came riding up on horseback, along with his brother, who acted as his bailiff, with his gun over his shoulder, and never left the spot. He slept out in the fields, in spite of the malaria, so as to look after his interests, without troubling himself about God or man. The poor wretches who, in the fine season, had forgotten the hard days of the winter, remained open-mouthed, hearing him run over the litany of their debts. “So many pounds of beans that your wife came to fetch at the time of the snow. So many faggots handed over to your son. So many bushels of grain you have had in advance, for seed, with interest, at so much a month. Now make up the account.” A confused account enough. In that year of dearth, when Uncle Carmenio had left his sweat and his health in his Reverence’s fields, he was forced, when harvest came, to leave his donkey there too, to pay his debts, and went off empty-handed, with ugly words in his mouth—blasphemies that were enough to freeze your very blood. His Reverence, who was not there to hear confessions, let him swear,—and led the ass into his own stable.

But after 1860, when heresy had triumphed, what good did all his power and influence do him? The country people learning to read and write, and able to add up accounts better than he himself; parties fighting for office in the municipal government, and sharing the spoils without a consideration in the world for any one but themselves; the next beggar in the street able to get legal advice for nothing, if he had a quarrel with you, and force you to pay the costs alone! A priest was nothing whatever nowadays—either for the judge or the militia captain; he could no longer, by dropping a hint, get people imprisoned if they failed in respect to him; in fact, he was good for nothing but to say mass and hear confessions, just as though he were a servant of the public. The judge was afraid of the papers—of public opinion—of what Tom, Dick, and Harry would say—and balanced his decisions like Solomon! They even envied his Reverence the property he had acquired in the sweat of his brow; they had “overlooked” him and cast spells on him; the little he ate at dinner tortured him at night; while his brother, who led a hard life and dined on bread and garlic, had the digestion of an ostrich, and knew very well that, in a hundred years’ time, when he, the priest, was dead, he would be his heir, and find himself rich without lifting a finger. His mother, poor body, was past work now—she survived only to suffer herself and be a trouble to other people—helpless in her bed with paralysis; she had to be waited on, instead of waiting on him. Everything went wrong in these days.

“There’s no religion now—no justice—no anything!” he would grumble, as he was growing old. “Now everybody wants to have his say. Those who have nothing want to grab your share. ‘Get out of that and let me get in!’ That’s it! They’d like to reduce the priests to sacristans—leave them nothing to do but say mass and sweep out the church. They don’t want to obey God’s commandments any more—that’s what’s the matter with them!”

G. Verga.

PADRON ’NTONI’S POLITICS.

... Padron ’Ntoni knew nothing about politics, and contented himself with minding his own affairs, for he used to say, “He who has charge of a house cannot sleep when he pleases,” and “He who commands has to give account.”

In December 1863, ’Ntoni, the eldest of his grandsons, had been called out for the naval conscription. Padron ’Ntoni went at once to all the big-wigs of the village, thinking that they would be able to help him. But Don Giammaria the priest said that it served him right, and that this was the fruit of that revolution of Satan they had brought about when they hoisted the tricolour on the church tower. On the other hand, Don Franco the chemist began to laugh under his great beard, and assured Padron ’Ntoni, rubbing his hands, that as soon as they were able to rig up a bit of a republic, which was what was wanted, every one who had to do with the conscription and the taxes should be kicked out; that there would then be no more soldiers, but every man in the country would go to war if it were needed. Then Padron ’Ntoni prayed and entreated him to get the Republic made soon—before his grandson ’Ntoni had to go for a soldier, just as though Don Franco had the Republic in his pocket, insomuch that the chemist ended by losing his temper. Then Don Silvestro, the Syndic’s secretary, nearly killed himself with laughing, and said that a nice little sum paid into the pockets of such and such personages he knew of would have the effect of producing in ’Ntoni some defect which would make him ineligible for service.

G. Verga.

MASTRO PEPPE’S MAGIC.

Mastro Peppe La Bravetta was a stout, stupid, good-natured man, living in Pescara, who sold pots and pans, and was terribly in awe of his wife, the severe and miserly Donna Pelagia, who ruled him with a rod of iron. Besides the income derived from his business, he possessed a piece of land on the other side of the river which produced enough to keep a pig. To this property the couple were wont to repair every January, to preside over the killing and salting of the pig which had been fattening through the year.

Now one year it so happened that Pelagia was not very well, and La Bravetta went to attend the execution alone. And to him, in the course of the afternoon, came two of his friends, graceless vagabonds, Matteo Puriello, nicknamed Ciávola, who was a poacher, and Biagio Quaglia, better known as Il Ristabilito, whose most serious occupation was that of playing the guitar at weddings and on other festive occasions.

When he saw these two approaching he welcomed them enthusiastically, and then, leading them into the building where the wonderful pig was laid out on the table, asked—

“What do you say to this, now? Isn’t he a beauty? What do you think of him?”

The two friends contemplated the pig in silent wonder, and Ristabilito clicked his tongue appreciatively against his palate. Ciávola asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Salt it down,” replied La Bravetta, in a voice which trembled with greedy delight of future banquets.

“Going to salt it?” cried Ristabilito suddenly. “Going to salt it? But, Ciá, did you ever see any man so stupid as this fellow? To let such a chance slip!”

La Bravetta, quite dumfoundered, stared first at one and then at the other with his calf-like eyes.

“Donna Pelagge has always kept you under her thumb,” continued Ristabilito. “This time she can’t see you; why shouldn’t you sell the pig, and then we’ll feast on the money.”

“But Pelagge?” stammered La Bravetta, who was filled with an immense consternation by the image of his wrathful wife presented to his mind’s eye.

“Tell her that the pig was stolen,” said Ciávola, with a gesture of impatience.

La Bravetta shuddered.

“How am I to go home and tell her that? Pelagge won’t believe me—she’ll drive me—she’ll ... You don’t know what Pelagge is!”

“Uh! Pelagge! uh! uh! Donna Pelagge!” jeered the two arch-plotters in chorus. And then Ristabilito, imitating Peppe’s whining voice, and his wife’s sharp and strident one, acted a comic scene in which Peppe was utterly routed, scolded, and finally cuffed like a naughty boy.

Ciávola walked round the pig, scarcely able to move for laughing. The unfortunate butt, seized with a violent fit of sneezing, waved his arms helplessly, trying to interrupt the dramatic representation. All the window-panes trembled with the noise. The flaming sunset streamed in on three very different human faces.

When Ristabilito stopped, Ciávola said—

“Well, let’s go away!”

“If you’ll stay to have supper——” began Mastro Peppe, somewhat constrainedly.

“No, no, my dear boy,” interrupted Ciávola, as he turned towards the door, “you do as Pelagge tells you, and salt the pig.”

As the two friends walked along the road Ristabilito said to Ciávola—

“Compare, shall we steal that pig to-night?”

“How?” said Ciávola.

“I know how, if they leave it where it was when we saw it.”

“Well, let’s do it. But, then?” said Ciávola.

The other’s whole face lit up, and fairly vibrated with a grin of delight.

“Never mind—I know,” was all he said.

They saw Don Bergamino Camplone coming along in the moonlight—a black figure between the rows of leafless poplars with their silvery trunks. They immediately quickened their pace to meet him; and the jolly priest, seeing their festive looks, asked with a smile—

“What’s up now?”

The friends briefly communicated their project to Don Bergamino, who assented with much cheerfulness. And Ristabilito added, in a low voice—

“Here we shall have to manage things cunningly. You know that Peppe, ever since he took up with that ugly old hag of a Donna Pelagge, has been getting very stingy, and at the same time he’s very fond of wine. Now we must go and fetch him and take him to Assaù’s tavern. You, Don Bergamino, must treat us all round. Peppe will drink as much as ever he can, seeing it costs him nothing, and will get as drunk as a pig; and then——”

The others agreed, and they went to Peppe’s house, which was about two rifle-shots distant. When they were near enough Ciávola lifted up his voice—

“Ohé! La Bravetta-a-a! Are you coming to Assaù’s? The priest is here, and he’s going to pay for a bottle of wine for us. Ohé-é-é!”

La Bravetta was not long in descending, and all four set off in a row, joking and laughing in the moonlight. In the stillness the caterwauling of a distant cat was heard at intervals, and Ristabilito remarked—

“Oh! Pé! don’t you hear Pelagge calling you to come back?”

---

They crossed the ferry, reached the tavern, and sat till late over Assaù’s wine, which Mastro Peppe found so good that he was at last discovered to be incapable of walking home. They assisted him back to the house and left him to go upstairs alone, which he did with some difficulty, talking disconnectedly all the time about Lepruccio the butcher and the quantity of salt needed for the pig, and quite oblivious of the fact that he had left the door unfastened. They waited a while, and then, entering softly, found the pig on the table, and carried it off between them, shaking with suppressed laughter. It was very heavy, and they were quite out of breath when they reached the priest’s house.

In the morning, Mastro Peppe having slept off his wine, awoke, and lay still a little while on his bed, stretching his limbs and listening to the bells as they rang for the Eve of St. Anthony. Even in the confusion of his first awakening he felt a contented sense of possession steal through his mind, and tasted by anticipation the delight of seeing Lepruccio cutting up and covering with salt the plump joints of pork.

Under the impulse of this idea, he rose, and hurried out, rubbing his eyes the while to get a better view. Nothing was to be seen on the table but a stain of blood, with the morning sun shining on it.

“The pig! Where is the pig?” cried the bereaved one hoarsely.

A furious excitement seized upon him. He rushed downstairs, saw the open door, struck his forehead with his fists, and burst into the open air yelling aloud—calling all his farm labourers round him, and asking them if they had seen the pig—if they had taken it. He multiplied his complaints, raising his voice more and more; and at last the doleful sound, echoing along the river-bank, reached the ears of Ciávola and Il Ristabilito.

They therefore repaired to the spot at their ease, fully agreed to enjoy the sight and keep up the joke. When they came in sight, Mastro Peppe turned to them, all afflicted and in tears, and exclaimed, “Oh! poor me! They have stolen the pig! Oh! poor me! What shall I do?—what shall I do?”

Biagio Quaglia stood for a while, looking at this most unhappy man out of his half-shut eyes, with an expression midway between derision and admiration, and his head inclined to one shoulder, as if critically judging of some dramatic effort. Then he came closer and said—

“Ah! yes, yes—one can’t deny it.... You play your part well.”

Peppe, not understanding, lifted his face all furrowed with the tracks of tears....

“To tell the truth, I never thought you would have been so cute,” Ristabilito went on. “Well done! Bravo! I’m delighted!”

“What’s that you’re saying?” asked La Bravetta between his sobs. “What’s that you’re saying? Oh! poor me! How can I ever go home again?”

“Bravo! bravo! that’s right!” insisted Ristabilito. “Go on! Yell harder!—cry!—tear your hair! Make them hear! That’s it! Make them believe it!”

And Peppe, still weeping—

“But I say they have really and truly stolen it! Oh, dear! oh, dear!”

“That’s it! Go on! Don’t stop! Again!”

Peppe, quite beside himself with exasperation and grief, redoubled his asseverations.

“I’m telling the truth! May I die now, at once, if they haven’t stolen that pig from me!”

“Oh, poor innocent!” jeered Ciávola. “Put your finger in your eye! How can we believe you, when we saw the pig here yesterday evening? Has St. Anthony given him wings to fly away with?”

“Oh, blessed St. Anthony! It is just as I say!”

“It’s not so!”

“It is.”

“No!”

“Oh! oh! oh! It is! it is! I’m a dead man! I don’t know how in the world I am to go home. Pelagge won’t believe me, and if she does, I shall never hear the end of it.... Oh! I’m dead!...”

At last they pretended to be convinced, and proposed a remedy for the misfortune.

“Listen here,” said Biagio Quaglia; “it must have been one of the people hereabouts; for it is certain that no one would have come from India to steal your pig, would they, Pé?”

“Of course, of course,” assented Peppe.

“Well then—attend to me now,” continued Ristabilito, delighted at the devout attention accorded to his words; “if no one came from India to rob you, it is certain that one of the people hereabouts must have been the thief; don’t you think so?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, what have we to do? We must get all these labourers together, and try some charm to discover the thief. And if we find the thief, we’ve found the pig.”

Mastro Peppe’s eyes brightened with eagerness, and he came closer, for the hint at a charm had awakened all his innate superstition.

“Now, you know, there are three kinds of magic—the black, the red, and the white. And you know there are three women in the village skilled in the art: Rosa Schiavona, Rosaria Pajara, and Ciniscia. You have only to choose.”

Peppe remained a moment in doubt. Then he decided for Rosaria Pajara, who enjoyed great fame as a sorceress, and had in past times performed several marvellous feats.

“Very well,” concluded Ristabilito; “there is no time to be lost. Now, just for your sake, and only to do you a pleasure, I am going to the town to get everything that will be wanted. I will talk to Rosaria, get her to give me everything, and come back before noon. Give me the money.”

Peppe took three carlini from his waistcoat pocket, and held them out hesitatingly.

“Three carlini?” shouted the other, putting back his hand. “Three carlini! She’ll want ten at least!”

On hearing this Pelagge’s husband was almost struck dumb.

“What? Ten carlini for a charm?” he stammered, feeling with trembling fingers in his pocket. “Here are eight for you. I have no more.”

“Well, well,” said Quaglia dryly; “we’ll see what we can do. Are you coming along, Ciá?”

The two companions set off at a smart pace for Pescara, along the poplar-bordered path, in Indian file, Ciávola demonstrating his delight by mighty thumps on Ristabilito’s back. When they reached the town, they entered the shop of a certain Don Daniele Pacentro, a chemist of their acquaintance. Here they purchased certain drugs and spices, and got him to make them up into little balls the size of walnuts, which were then well coated with sugar and baked. Biagio Quaglia (who had disappeared in the meantime) then returned with a paper full of dirt swept up in the road, of which he insisted on having two pills made, in appearance exactly similar to the others, but mixed with bitter aloes, and only very slightly coated with sugar. The chemist did as he was desired, putting a mark on the two bitter pills, at Ristabilito’s suggestion.

The two jokers now returned to Peppe’s farm, and reached it about noon. La Bravetta was awaiting them with great anxiety, and as soon as he saw them shouted, “Well?”

“Everything is in order!” replied Ristabilito triumphantly, showing the little box of magic confectionery. “Now, seeing to-day is the Eve of St. Anthony, and the peasants are taking a holiday, you must call them all together, out here in the open air, and give them a drink. You have some casks of Montepulciano; you might as well have some of that out for once. And when they are all assembled it will be my business to do and say all that has to be said and done.”

Two hours later, the afternoon being very warm, bright, and clear, and La Bravetta having spread the report, all the farmers of the neighbourhood and their labourers came in response to the invitation. A great flock of geese went waddling about among the heaps of straw in the yard; the smell of the stable came in puffs on the air. They stood there, quietly laughing and joking with one another, as they waited for the wine,—these rustics, with their bow-legs, bent by heavy labour,—some of them with faces wrinkled and ruddy as old apples, and eyes that had been made gentle by long patience, or quick with years of cunning; others young and limber, with beards just coming, and home care evidenced in their patched and mended clothes.

Ciávola and Ristabilito did not keep them waiting long. The latter, holding the box in his hand, directed them to make a circle round him, and then, standing in the middle, addressed them in a short oration, not without a certain gravity of voice and gesture.

“Neighbours,” he began, “none of you, I am sure, knows the real reason why Mastro Peppe de’ Sieri has summoned you here....”

A movement of astonishment at this strange preamble passed round the circle, and the joy at the promised wine gave place to uneasy expectations of various kinds. The orator continued—

“But, as something disagreeable might happen, and you might afterwards complain of me, I will tell you what it is all about before we make the experiment.”

The listeners looked into one another’s eyes with a bewildered air, and then cast curious and uncertain glances at the little box which the orator held in his hand. One of them, as Ristabilito paused to consider the effect of his words, exclaimed impatiently—

“Well?”

“Presently, presently, neighbours. Last night there was stolen from Mastro Peppe a fine pig which was going to be salted down. No one knows who the thief is; but it is quite certain that he will be found among you, because no one would come from India to steal Mastro Peppe’s pig.”

Whether it was a happy effect of the strange argument from India, or the action of the mild winter sun, La Bravetta began to sneeze. The rustics took a step backward, the whole flock of geese scattered in terror, and seven consecutive sneezes resounded freely in the air, disturbing the rural stillness of the spot. The noise restored some cheerfulness to the minds of the assembly, who in a little while regained their composure, and Ristabilito continued as gravely as ever—

“To find out the thief Mastro Peppe intends to give you to eat of certain good confetti, and to drink of a certain old Montepulciano, which he has tapped to-day on purpose. But I must tell you one thing first. The thief, as soon as he puts the sweets into his mouth, will find them bitter—so bitter that he will be forced to spit them out. Now, are you willing to try? Or perhaps the thief, rather than be found out in this way, would like to go and confess himself to the priest? Answer, neighbours.”

“We are willing to eat and drink,” replied the assembly, almost with one voice. And a wave of suppressed emotion passed through all these guileless folk. Each one looked at his neighbour with a point of interrogation in his eyes; and each one naturally tried to put a certain ostentatious spontaneity into his laughter.

Said Ciávola: “You must all stand in a row, so that no one can hide himself.”

When they were all ready he took the bottle and glasses, preparing to pour out the wine. Ristabilito went to one end of the row, and began quietly to distribute the confetti, which crunched and disappeared in a moment under the splendid teeth of the rustics. When he reached Mastro Peppe he handed him one of the pills prepared with aloes, and passed on without giving any sign.

Mastro Peppe, who till then had been standing staring with his eyes wide open, intent on surprising the culprit, put the pill into his mouth almost with gluttonous eagerness and began to chew. Suddenly his cheeks rose with a sudden movement towards his eyes, the corners of his mouth and his temples were filled with wrinkles, the skin of his nose was drawn up into folds, his lower jaw was twisted awry; all his features formed a pantomimic expression of horror, and a sort of visible shudder ran down the back of his neck and over his shoulders. Then, suddenly, since the tongue could not endure the bitterness of the aloes, and a lump rising in his throat made it simply impossible for him to swallow, the miserable man was forced to spit.

“Ohé, Mastro Pé, what are you doing?” exclaimed the sharp, harsh voice of Tulespre dei Passeri, an old goatherd, greenish and shaggy as a swamp tortoise.

Hearing this, Ristabilito, who had not yet finished distributing the pills, turned suddenly round. Seeing that La Bravetta was contorting his features and limbs in agony, he said, with an air of the greatest benevolence—

“Well, perhaps that one was too much done! Here is another! swallow it, Peppe!”

And with his finger and thumb he crammed the second aloe-pill into Peppe’s mouth.

The poor man took it, and, feeling the goatherd’s sharp, malignant eyes fixed on him, made a supreme effort to overcome his disgust; he neither chewed nor swallowed the pill, but kept his tongue motionless against his teeth. But when the aloes began to dissolve, he could bear it no longer; his lips began to writhe as before, his eyes filled with tears, which soon overflowed and ran down his cheeks. At last he had to spit the thing out.

“Ohé, Mastro Pé, and what are you doing now?” cried the goatherd again, with a grin which showed his toothless, whitish gums. “Oh! and indeed, now, what does this mean?”

All the peasants broke from their ranks and surrounded La Bravetta, some with laughing derision, others with angry words. The sudden and brutal revulsions of pride to which the sense of honour of the rustic population is subject—the implacable rigidity of superstition—now suddenly exploded in a tempest of abuse.

“What did you make us come here for? To try and lay the blame on us with a false charm? To cheat us? What for? Thief! liar! son of a dog! etc., etc. Would you cheat us? You scoundrel! you thief, you! We are going to break all your pots and dishes! Thief! son of a dog!” etc., etc., da capo.

Having smashed the bottle and glasses, they went their ways, shouting back their concluding imprecations from among the poplars.

There remained on the threshing-floor Ciávola, Ristabilito, the geese, and La Bravetta. The latter, filled with shame, rage, and confusion, and with his mouth still sore from the bitterness of the aloes, could not utter a word. Ristabilito, with a refinement of cruelty, stood looking at him, shaking his head ironically, and tapping the ground with his foot. Ciávola crowed, with an indescribable mockery in his voice—

“Ah! ah! ah! ah! Bravo, La Bravetta! Now do tell us—how much did you make by it? Ten ducats?”

Gabriele d’Annunzio.

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY.

“It is no use talking, my dear fellow!—there are times when it is simply impossible to say no. They urge you—they worry you—they lay you under obligation by so many kind attentions, that a refusal would be an actual breach of good manners towards people whose only thought is to do you a kindness.”

You allege business. “Oh!” they reply, “the world will not come to an end for one day’s absence.” It is too hot? “Come in the morning, when it is cool.” The village is such a long way from the station? “We will send the gig for you.” You have engaged to pass the day with a friend? “Bring him along with you....” In short, I said yes,—and so on Sunday morning I went and did the deed.

When I had reached the village, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of peasants coming out from early mass, who looked at me as if I had been a wild beast, I asked for Signor Cosimo’s house. Eight or ten people immediately offered to accompany me thither.

“There it is—up there; do you see that house with a little tower on the top?—that’s it. Do you know Sor Cosimo? Ah! he’s a good gentleman! And his brother the priest? And his wife, Sora Flavia? She’s a kind lady, so she is, and gives away ever so much money. And Sora Olimpia, too, Signor Cosimo’s sister.... She’s one who has her own ideas ... as who should say that she has such a passion for books that she always has one in her hands, and has nearly lost her head over them; but afterwards, do you see? she repeats them all by heart, in a way that no one could believe it! And she is a good creature too; and, as for her family, when there is anything to be put on paper, I don’t see how they could ever do without her.... There used to be Bistino, Sor Cosimo’s eldest son, but now he is in the seminary at Volterra, and they say that he does them so much credit there that they won’t even let him come home for the holidays. There’s a boy for you! When he was at home, and used to help his uncle the chaplain at his net,[^[15]] the two between them caught more birds in a day than all the other nets in a week.... Look, sir, you turn this way and go up hill, and you can’t miss it!”

All this varied information about my hosts, with whom I was already slightly acquainted, was given me on the way by the peasants, who, each in turn, vied with the rest in bestowing it on me, till, having escorted me to the end of a short avenue leading to the villa, they quitted me with respectful salutations, after asking me whether I required any servants.

Scarcely had I rung the bell when the door was opened by a youth in his shirt sleeves, and a white apron tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

“Is Signor Cosimo in?”

“Oh! yes, sir! Come in, come in! You are that gentleman from Florence who sent yesterday to say that perhaps he would come to-day—eh?”

“Yes.”

“Come, then, come along! The master said I was to show you into the best room, and he will come presently. That’s right, sir! You’ve done well to come. Such a long time as they’ve been talking about you, and expecting you! Are they all well at Florence? See; come in here and sit down. Will you excuse me, sir?”

“Go on, go on, my good fellow.”

I went and sat down by the window, and began to turn over an old photograph album. In the meantime I perceived that my arrival might truly be said to have created a sensation, since I could hear on the first floor a great banging of doors and a going and coming of shod and unshod feet, which caused a thick shower of whitewash to descend from the ceiling, and the window-panes and the glass shade covering a wax figure on the sideboard to vibrate as with an earthquake.

After a few minutes I heard a scratching at the door, then a kick against it; it opened, and I saw a child of about six years, with a half-eaten apple in his hand. He looked at me with an air of displeasure, and asked—

“I say, is that your book? You’ve got to put it down at once—if you don’t, I’ll tell my uncle the priest.”

I laid aside the album, but he continued to look daggers at me.

“Are you that stranger that was to come to-day?”

“Yes, little one.” Affecting a caressing gentleness, in order to conciliate him, I held out my hand. The small boy retreated two paces, and showed symptoms of being about to throw the apple at my head.

“Will you keep your hands to yourself? What did you come up here for?”

I was beginning to feel annoyed, and did not answer.

“Yes, yes—father told you to come—I know that well enough; but mother didn’t want you, because she had to have all those fowls killed. Gostino is plucking them just now. But you’re going away this evening?... Won’t you answer? But I hope you are,—because, when mother saw you coming along the road, she wished you all sorts of bad luck.”...

The door opened, and there appeared, shod in slippers, the magnificent bulk of Signor Cosimo, who, smiling cordially, clapped his great hands on my shoulders, saying, three times over, “Bravo, bravo, bravo!” Then, turning to the small boy, he demanded—

“What are you doing here?”

“Just what I think fit!” replied the infant, who was thereupon expelled from the room with a tremendous box on the ear, after which his father turned to me and invited me to be seated.

My eye was at once caught by the grease-spots, and stains of wine and coffee, which adorned Signor Cosimo’s shirt and trousers. To tell the truth, I was uncomfortably affected by the sense of a want of consideration towards myself, but was soon appeased by his apologies for having kept me waiting, because he had gone upstairs to his own room, to “clean himself up a bit.”

“Oh! but.... Don’t mention it, Signor Cosimo!”

“Oh! bravo! bravo! bravo! But what a season, eh? Look here, you must be in need of some refreshment.... Gostino-o-o-o! What are they saying? What do they say in Florence about the crops?... Bravo! bravo! It is very good of you to have come; you have given us a regular treat!”

“Did you call, sir?”

“Go upstairs, Gostino, and ask your mistress to give you the keys of the sideboard, and bring this gentleman some refreshments.” Then to the child, who had returned in the wake of the servitor, “Go at once and get your face washed and make yourself fit to be seen.” With that, he boxed the small boy’s ears a second time, and turned him out of the room.

“And as to fruit, my dear sir, there’s nothing at all this year.”

“Ah!”

“Well, what is one to say? For the last three years it’s clear there has been witchcraft in it. Just imagine it. I used to put aside four hundred pounds in a year, and now ... sometimes fifty, sometimes sixty.... And then, what stuff it is! Every bit worm-eaten! I beg your pardon, but will you come down into the granary with me? But, no—I hear my brother coming down; we’ll wait for him.”

“Let us wait for him, by all means.”

“He’s a queer sort of customer, you know—a confirmed grumbler!—but, after all, a good sort at bottom. The other day, for instance, do you see——he suffers so much from——”

These preliminaries to the introduction were interrupted by the appearance of Don Paolo himself, who entered the room with a profound bow. I rose, and was going to meet him, but he protested.

“No, no, I won’t have it—don’t disturb yourself, sir. If you will excuse me, I will keep my hat on, as that is my custom. Sit down, sit down, pray.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Sor Cosimo resumed the conversation.

“You see, Paolo, this is the gentleman whom we were speaking of——”

“I know! I know! Bless you! can’t you make an end of it? How many times do you find it necessary to repeat a thing?”

“No—I wanted to tell you——”

“Have you sent for refreshments?”

“I told Gostino. He is just coming.”

“And so you’re from Florence, eh?” asked the chaplain, turning to me.

“At your service.”

“A wretched year, my dear sir! If it does not rain soon we shall never get any crops to speak of.... A year ago this very day I had taken fifty-six birds by ten o’clock; and this morning, before I came away to mass at eight, we had caught three miserable little things, and an accursed hawk that has half bitten my hand to pieces—look! Are they taking any at Florence?”

“To tell the truth, I have never asked.”

“Is the Prior of San Gaggio catching any this year?—is he catching any?”

“To my knowledge ... I could not say at all.”

“Ah! because last Friday he sent to tell me that he had not even had the decoy-cages made. He says that Father Lorenzo della Santissima Annunziata is not well. Is that true?”

“To tell the truth ... I do not know.”

“What!—do you know nothing, then?”

“I will tell you.... Let us rather speak of yourself. Signor Cosimo was telling me just now——”

“I must run out for a moment to the net. I say, Cosimo, what time is dinner?”

“Tell the women to get it at any hour that suits you.”

“Ah! here’s one of them,” said Don Paolo, who was just in the doorway. “What o’clock do we dine, Flavia?—at twelve?”

Signora Flavia, the wife of my host, bowed her head in assent as she entered the room, while the chaplain, an unsaluted guest, went off to his nets. She came to meet me, asked me how I was, said that she was pleased to hear it before I had time to answer “Well,” and planted herself in a chair to look at me. Sor Cosimo, upon Whom all the conversation seemed to devolve, remarked—

“See, Flavia, this is the gentleman who, as I was telling you the other evening——” Whereupon Sora Flavia began again, da capo.

“How are you?—Well?”

“Yes, madam.”

“And your wife?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Remember me to her.” Then, looking at her husband as if to ask him whether she ought to say any more to me, she relapsed into silence, and fell to contemplating me again.

Fortunately Signor Cosimo relieved me from the embarrassment of choosing the subject of conversation by reverting to politics. The Tunis Question being then at its height, he naturally fell upon it tooth and nail, grew heated and excited, and blurted out, puffing and blowing, all his ideas touching foreign politics, concluding with the statement that if he and his brother the priest had been in the Cabinet, there would not be a Frenchman in Tunis.... At this point Signora Flavia interrupted him by asking me if there was any cotton in the material of my coat. I choked down a burst of laughter, and hazarded the answer that there was not.

“Then it is very dear, is it not?”

“Yes; I think it was seven francs a mètre.”

“Ah! they measure by mètres, do they? It must be good stuff, though. Just look, Cosimo; you ought to have one made like it——”

“Yes, yes; just like you—always interrupting! We’ll speak of that afterwards.”... Then, turning to me again—

“Because, if France——” He was just about to recommence the attack on Tunis when the door opened to admit his sister Olimpia, a maiden lady of fifty or so, the same whose literary reputation had made so great an impression on the peasants.

She had on a faded light blue dress, wore a crinoline, and carried a puce-coloured mantilla over her arm. On her head she had a broad-brimmed straw hat of a dingy yellow, adorned with a wreath of real ivy, and two small locks of well-greased hair fell in soft folds on the slightly roughened skin of her cheeks. In one hand she carried her parasol and a bunch of lavender; in the other a book, in which she kept her finger to mark the place. She advanced with ostentatious ease of manner, and bowed, half-shutting her eyes.

“Sir,” she said, “you are welcome to this modest habitation.”

“A delicious habitation, Signorina, where I should be very sorry to be troublesome.” She again half-shut her eyes, and smiled on me. Retiring backwards, as gracefully as she could, she went and sat down with her back to the window. She was evidently well acquainted with the clumsy artifices of a very mature young lady.

I was contemplating her with the utmost attention, when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder, and Sor Cosimo said to me—

“You ought to hear what poetry this girl writes! Have you got it here, Olimpia—that sonnet you made last Sunday?”

“That ode, you mean—come!”

“Well, well—sonnet or ode—it’s the same thing. But if you could hear it—with rhymes, and all! I tell you! Come, let us hear it!”

“Afterwards, Cosimo, afterwards!”

Heaven preserve me! Turning to Signorina Olimpia, who still kept her finger in her book, I asked—

“What are you reading, may I ask?”

“I am just glancing over Leopardi.”

“Ah! ah!” And Sor Cosimo broke in—

“Fine! fine!—ah! very fine!”

“Are you acquainted with his works, Sor Cosimo?”

“Oh! most certainly! She read it to us last Sunday at dessert, and made us all cry like babies.”

“No, Cosimo, you do not understand. The gentleman means this book that I have here.”

“Ah! what! Well, well!... I was speaking of the sonnet. But you shall hear it afterwards.... And you must repeat that one too that you wrote when Calamai’s son was made a priest. Oh! that! And then.... But don’t imagine, sir, that she has only one. She has a whole drawer full, and you may say that, if one is fine, others are not so bad.... Well, you shall hear.”

I was eager to hear her opinion of Leopardi, and asked—

“What do you think of this book, Signorina?”

“I will tell you,” she replied. “To say the truth, I have scarcely got at the bottom of it as yet, ... but, if I must speak sincerely, it seems to me there is not much interest in it.”

“Ah!”

“Don’t you think so too?”

“Well—yes—in a manner of speaking, yes!”

“If you will allow me to say so, no story is ever finished properly. You find Consalvo—that, now, is stolen from Tasso, the scene of Clorinda and Tancred.... Well, you find Consalvo. What then? Consalvo dies, and, at least as far as I have got, one hears no more of her. And the same thing with the characters. There is that one of that Nerina; it would be fine enough, but, good heavens! it is so little developed ... and one does not know what to make of it...! Do you agree with me?”

“Well ... to tell the truth ...”

“You see, Cosimo, whether or not I was right when we were discussing the subject the other evening with Signora Amalia.”

“I should think so, indeed!” exclaimed Sor Cosimo, testifying his approval by a great guffaw of laughter. “Do you mean to say you would compare yourself with that conceited creature? Let her go for seven years to school with the Sisters of St. Francis de Sales, as you have been, and then come and talk to us....”

---

The amazing literary criticisms of Sor Cosimo and his sister completely took away my breath. I was relieved from the necessity of answering by the appearance of Gostino with a bottle and a tray of glasses.

“I am sure you’ll like this wine, sir; you’ll see!” said Gostino as he poured me out some wine.

“Come, come, Gostino!” said Signorina Olimpia.

“Look sharp, Gostino,” continued Sor Cosimo; “go and fetch two more bottles—one of ’62 (you’ll find it on the table at the end of the cellar), and the other of ’59 (the year of the Revolution), and you shall see”—he turned to me again—“you shall see you have never tasted any like this!”

“But ... that’s enough, Signor Cosimo!”

“Come, come; no compliments. While it’s coming you’ll take another drop of this, won’t you?”

“Thanks, but I could not.... I am not accustomed....”

“Sir—I’m going to have another glass too—as the friar took a wife, for company’s sake.... Shall I pour you some out? You can throw it away afterwards, if you like—but I must pour if out”

“Very well, then; since you wish it so, another sip.... Enough,—that’s enough!”

“No, sir—the glass full, or none!”

Gostino returned with the other bottles, and then they all fell upon me, beginning with Signora Flavia, and not excluding Gostino, beseeching me to try those also. Signor Cosimo nudged my elbow, Gostino poured out the wine, and the two ladies entreated me with eloquent glances not to do them the wrong of refusing this attention.

I resisted for a little, but had to give way at last; and then my evil genius inspired me with the notion of praising the quality of the wine, and remarking that not only must the grapes have been exquisite, but the casks and cellars first-rate also. I regretted the words the moment they were out of my mouth.

“I’m going to show you them,” said Sor Cosimo immediately.

He took my arm, and, leaving the ladies in the dining-room, dragged me off to the cellar, with Gostino to light the way—now warning me of a step, and again requesting me to stoop where the ceiling was low, and at last showing himself more astonished than I could possibly be at the beauty of a cobwebbed vault, with a few casks along one wall, and two smaller barrels in a corner.

As it was necessary for me to be astonished, and to admire something, I began to praise the solid construction of the house, which I inferred from an inspection of the basement walls.

“Well, you shall see it now!”

From the cellar we ascended to the ground floor, which I had to review in detail—dining-room, ironing-room, kitchen, oven, larder, cupboards.... Then the new staircase—the first one was where the store-room is now.... Then the study, which his brother the priest had wished to have on the site of the stable they had had pulled down, but that was too damp.... Then up to the first floor—drawing-room, sitting-rooms, bed-rooms, and everything,—in fact, before I knew what I was about, I beheld Sora Olimpia trying on her puce-coloured mantle before the looking-glass.... “Look out of the window—now isn’t that a view? There’s the kitchen-garden. We’ll go there afterwards, but first you must see the second floor.”

We went up to the second floor, where he led me round for some twenty minutes, explaining in detail the destination of every apartment, together with the most noteworthy events which had taken place in the same—from the large room where the silkworms lived to the dark den where the chaplain kept the bullfinches he was teaching to pipe....

At the foot of the stairs we met Don Paolo returning from his quail nets, puffing and blowing, and grumbling at the Provost’s hurry to get to church. “Was he afraid of not finishing mass in time to get back to dinner, the great glutton? Do, for any sake, go on, Cosimo; do me the kindness—bad luck to this sort of work!—and tell them to be getting ready in the meantime, and I’ll come in ten minutes—if they don’t like that, they may sing mass by themselves....”

“Do you see?” whispered Sor Cosimo to me, “that’s his way. If he doesn’t catch any birds he becomes a regular beast. Come, let us go on; the ladies will follow by themselves.”

“They have already started, sir,” said Gostino.

“All the better; come along.”

I should have been thankful to sit down and rest for a minute, but had to follow Sor Cosimo, who, in order to get away from his brother, set off at such a pace that it was difficult to keep up with him.

Mountains stand firm, and men move on. When Sor Cosimo, hurrying into the door of the canon’s house, left me under the church-porch, my eye fell on a well-dressed man whose face somehow seemed familiar. As we passed each other, in walking up and down, I saw that his eyes were fixed on me, and that he was smiling, as if about to address me. I was just about to speak to him, as we met for the third time, when he uttered my name, and I suddenly recalled his.

“After nineteen years! How in the world did you get here?”

“I’m the parish doctor. And you?”

“I only came out for the day.”

“You’ll come and dine with me?”

“I am engaged.”

“To whom?”

“We’ll speak of that afterwards. Now tell me about yourself.... How are you getting on?”

“As well as a country doctor ever does.”

“And with the peasants.”

“Badly.”

“Why?”

“Because, being a gentleman, I am not a beast like themselves.”

“I understand. And how about the local authorities?”

“No better. I am not on good terms with the Syndic; and, by-the-bye, I must be off before he comes.”

“The reason?”

“I was imprudent enough to contradict him in public—in the chemist’s shop, when, speaking of books on etiquette, he mentioned Monsignor della Casa and Flavio Gioja!”[^[16]]

“Who is this portent of erudition?”

“The wealthiest, the most cultured, the most respectable person in the commune—a certain Signor Cosimo.”

“My host!”

“Are you staying at his house?”

“I am!”

“How in the world—— But never mind now,—after dinner you must come to me and tell me about everything, and we shall be together till you leave. I have a great deal to talk to you about—I’ll drive you down to the station.... Now let us go in.”

“Here you see my masters,” he said, with a smile, as we came to a halt in a corner at the upper end of the church. “They are all up there. Do you know any of them?”

“Only Signor Cosimo’s family.”

“I’ll tell you the names of some—they are quite worth your attention. They wouldn’t be bad sort of people if it were not for the intolerable airs they give themselves on the strength of their ignorance. All well known, though!—all honest folks,—and all of them very much admired, because the rest of the parish are greater asses than they. Do you see the priest who is celebrating? That is the Provost of Siepole. A profound theologian—a thriving dealer in oil—confessor to the nunnery—a great eater.... He doesn’t like me, but he puts up with me ever since I cured him of an indigestion which he brought on by eating salted cheese and beans.”

“He’s not young,” I observed.

“Over sixty. The one at his right is his chaplain, who is at daggers drawn with me, and gives it out all over the country that I am a lunatic, because I once refused to make him out a false certificate of illness. I think there is not much love lost between the two, for family reasons.... And yet they are never apart; the chaplain’s chief occupation is to water down his superior’s oaths. Every time the Provost takes a trick at cards he says ‘Giuraddio,’ and the chaplain qualifies it with ‘Bacco.’ So they go on, for the sake of saving appearances and their souls; but sometimes the Provost feels it as an insult to his dignity, and takes it ill, and then he snubs the chaplain, and in his wrath the oaths come dropping out like the beads off a broken rosary, while the chaplain goes on counteracting them with his ‘Bacco! bacco!’ quite unmoved, and ready to face martyrdom rather than yield. He is the best shot about here, and could beat the whole village at briscola. The poor people adore him, because he says mass in ten minutes, is easy at confession, and has no scruples about thrashing any man that tries to play tricks on him.

“The little thin man on this side is an unattached priest—a good fellow—miserably poor, and in wretched health. He contrives to worry along somehow and support an elder sister and two grand-children of hers, whom he teaches himself. He is master, father, and uncle to them, all in one; and ekes out his means by the help of four or five other pupils, whom he picks up wherever he can at a franc a month. No one knows how he does it, but he pays his way, and keeps an honoured name as a good citizen and blameless priest; and, above all, he is such a rara avis as not to call down the curse of heaven on his country.[^[17]]... In the village, as you may easily understand, people either don’t trouble their heads about him, or else they despise him.

“That other is Sor Cosimo’s brother, whom you know.... I’ll tell you something about him too; but hush!... every one is kneeling down....”

The silence was followed by the usual shuffling of feet, tinkling of medals, and indispensable volley of previously suppressed coughs. The air was becoming more and more unendurably close. The doctor recommenced his remarks in an undertone.

“And Sor Cosimo’s brother ... he is nicknamed ‘Thickskull’, and yet...” Here he leaned over and whispered in my ear....

“Never!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “Every day?”

“On my word of honour!”

Here Sor Cosimo smiled at me from the other side of the church, and waved his hand at the organ, as if to say, “What an instrument we have, and what an organist! You hear—eh?”

“That man beside Sor Cosimo, with the great black silk scarf round his neck,” my friend went on, “is Stelloni the miller, a member of the School Board. Sor Cosimo nominated him, because—considering the antipathy which Stelloni has shown towards all schools from his childhood up—he was able to assure the Council that he would never be one to advocate unnecessary expense! In fact, Stelloni, true to his principles, has never set foot inside a schoolhouse. He says it is from a desire not to compromise himself, knowing, as he does, that things are not managed in the way he would approve of; low and unmannerly people say it is because he is afraid of having to question the children. He’s a good-natured sort of fellow, though, and hates no one in the world except the schoolmaster—that pale young man standing over there by the pillar,—because he once corrected a grammatical mistake in a composition by the miller’s son. Stelloni felt a kindly compassion for the master as long as the point remained doubtful; but when it was established beyond question that the master was right, his compassion turned to implacable hatred, and now he would be glad of any excuse for turning him out into the road to starve.

“That little thin old man, at the end of the row on the right, is one of the richest landowners in the place; a retired lawyer, and Sor Cosimo’s predecessor as Syndic. His ruling passion is that of running his head against stone walls, and systematically contradicting, at every meeting of the Council, everything that Sor Cosimo proposes. He has immortalised himself by means of two inscriptions which he had put up—with his own name in capital letters—during his term of office: one on the public well, when he had the pump put up,—the other you see opposite you—when he had the ciborium in the Chapel of the Seven Sorrows re-gilt at his own expense. He got himself elected Syndic in order to get the new government road run past the gates of his villa. Afterwards, when he found this impossible, and also failed to get the title of ‘Cavaliere,’ he retired in a rage. Now he relieves his feelings by taking the opposition side in the Council;—he turns off one tenant every year, and imprecates the wrath of Providence on the Government at every possible opportunity—even when the frost ruined his early tomatoes.”

“And you are in the hands of these people?” I remarked.

“I am in the hands of these people.”

... At the moment of going to table, Sor Cosimo said to me, with a wink, “We must keep up our spirits to-day—bravo! bravo!” Signora Flavia repeated, for the sixth time, her fear that I should find it penitential fare at best, seeing that they had made no alteration in their usual Sunday’s dinner.

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, ostensibly because I was hurt by these apologies, but in reality because I felt I could not stand much more. Signorina Olimpia preceded us, curtseying backwards, after having presented me with a roguish glance and a little bunch of jessamine; and we entered the dining-room, prepared for a great occasion, as was evident from the odorous presence of table-linen fresh from the quinces and lavender of the store-closet.

“Here we are,” Sor Cosimo began again. “We have no ceremony here—a little soup, a bit of boiled meat, a sweet thing or two, and that’s all!” He crossed himself and said grace.

The small boy whose acquaintance I had made in the morning, had, on entering the room, remained open-mouthed for a time; but when he had taken in all the preparations, and more especially a side-table covered with pastry, sweets and bottles, he could control himself no longer, and turning to me, yelled, bringing down both his fists on the table—

“Oh! I say, this is jolly! Look what a lot of nice things there are to-day, because you’re here!”

Sor Cosimo aimed a kick at him under the table, which fortunately missed its mark; and immediately a frozen silence fell upon the guests.

The women sighed,—the men glared upon that boy with looks which ought to have reduced him to ashes on the spot,—and I turned to Signor Cosimo and asked him, with an air of innocent bewilderment, what his son had said. My stratagem was perfectly successful, and every one’s face had brightened up when Gostino appeared in his shirt sleeves, bringing in the soup. Signora Flavia called him to her, and whispered something in his ear. At the next course Gostino returned in his shooting-jacket, and with his hat on. Signora Flavia called him again; and when he next appeared, with the boiled meat, he had left his hat behind, and cast a questioning glance at his mistress, as much as to say, “Is it right now?” She nodded an affirmative, but Sor Cosimo signified to him, by another glance, that he ought to have known these things without being told. Gostino signified, in reply, by a shrug of his shoulders, that they had been bothering him unnecessarily, and requested me to take another piece of chicken.

This politeness on Gostino’s part was the signal for attack. The wine had begun to revive the spirits of the company, and had affected Sor Cosimo more than the rest. A tenant came in to say that at Don Paolo’s net in the garden they had taken seven bullfinches, by which means he too was cheered up; and now I found myself overwhelmed by the avalanche of attentions these good people bestowed on me. They heaped my plate with eatables, and pressed on me one dish after another, new ones appearing every time I imagined dinner was at an end. I must take some spinach, because it was a rarity at this time of year; I must taste that other dish, because Signorina Olimpia had made the sauce herself. And all the time Gostino was behind my chair, reproaching me for eating nothing, and Signora Flavia was lamenting that the dinner was not to my taste....

At last it was at an end....

And the conversation during dinner? There was none! There was a continual, dull succession of “Take some——”—“Thank you”—“You’re not eating”—“You’re not drinking”—and of roars of laughter whenever they had hit upon a new device for cramming me to death.

“The poems, Olimpia, the poems!” yelled Signor Cosimo at last. “The sonnet for Calamai!”

I turned at once to Signorina Olimpia, to read in her eyes the gravity of the calamity which threatened me, and I saw there an expression which made me sorry for her. Signora Flavia had the same look, and even in the face of that irrepressible child I thought I read something like fear. They all gazed at Sor Cosimo in a piteously questioning manner, and then simultaneously turned towards the place at the end of the table, at his right.

At that point the master of the house called Gostino, in a tone of vexation, and the latter appeared, in company with two tenants, who, seizing Don Paolo under the arms, dragged him like a log out of the room. I jumped up to offer my assistance, but Sor Cosimo stopped me, telling me, with a look of mingled pain and humiliation, that I was not to be frightened—it was quite a customary thing.

“In an hour or two he’ll be all right—heart complaint. The attacks come on when he has over-eaten himself a little....”

“But why does he not try to moderate himself?”

Sor Cosimo shrugged his shoulders.

“Does it often happen?” I inquired.

“Every day, poor uncle!” replied Signorina Olimpia. “Ah! it is indeed a great inconvenience!”

“And what does the doctor say?”

“Ah!” exclaimed Sor Cosimo. “Precisely!—you know him, that—that——” He had no epithet wherewith to qualify the doctor. “The doctor laughs.... I’ll tell you what he says—he laughs; and when I sent for him the second time, after one of these attacks, ... and when it was I who had got him his appointment, you understand? I got it for him! Well, he had the audacity to say to that poor fellow, ‘Chaplain, if I were you, I’d put a little water in it next time!’ There, do you understand now what the doctor says? But he has never set foot in my house since, and I hope.... Where are you going to give us coffee, Flavia, here, or in the garden?”

The matter being referred to me, I voted at once for the garden, eager to get a mouthful of fresh air, and all the more as it was a lovely day.... There was a ring at the gate bell, and Gostino having opened, I saw five persons advancing up the avenue—three priests and two laymen, all red in the face as turkey-cocks, and talking at the very top of their voices. Sor Cosimo took me by the arm, and drawing me forward, introduced me to the Provost of Siepole and his chaplain, then to the parish priest of the village, and lastly to the assessor Stelloni and the communal secretary.

---

The talk went on, chiefly on personal and local topics, beginning with the small-pox, which, according to Stelloni, was being “promulgated” in the neighbouring villages, and ending with Sor Cosimo’s fountain, which he regretted he could not turn on for our edification, as Don Paolo kept the key of the mechanism in his own chest of drawers.

Signora Flavia looked at us absently, with sleepy eyes, which she opened wide every time she heard an extra loud clatter of crockery from the kitchen, where Gostino was washing up. Signorina Olimpia, perhaps disgusted with a conversation which was unworthy of her, was wandering round the garden, casting loving looks at her flowers, till at last, stopping before a monthly rose with two bees on it, she exclaimed: “Dear insects,

“Sucking, for one brief moment,

Now this, now the other flower,

Alas! she said——”

“Always a poetess, Signorina Olimpia!” cried the Provost, “always a poetess! Are those your own verses, madam, are they yours?”

“Come now, Olimpia, out with it, before it is too late,” urged Sor Cosimo. “The sonnet to Calamai—we must have that at once, for it’s a beauty!”

“It is a wonder!” observed the Provost. “Do you know, I have it by heart; I could say it off, as though it were before me in print. It is the only one of yours I have heard.”

“Rejoice, O youthful boy...”

Signorina Olimpia was preparing to repeat the much-desired sonnet when Don Paolo appeared in the doorway of the house, looking as though he had gone to sleep in his clothes and were just out of bed, and stopped on the threshold, looking fixedly on the ground. They all went up to him, to congratulate him and ask how he felt....

“The heart, gentlemen! the heart!” He put both hands to the left side of his chest, half closing his eyes and twisting his mouth, as if to indicate a spasm which was taking away his breath. Then he asked—

“Have they done anything more at the nets, Cosimo?”

“Five more, Don Paolo!” shouted Gostino from the kitchen.

“Five! Then we’ve made it fifteen to-day!” cried Don Paolo, reviving as if by magic. “Gostino, my hat and stick!”

Sor Cosimo cast a glance at us to signify that we ought to go to the nets as well, and that this attention would be extremely grateful to his brother. The clergy, however, were brave enough to refuse, alleging that it would soon be time for vespers. The remaining four of us started—Sor Cosimo, the Secretary, Stelloni, and myself—to the great delight of Don Paolo, who led the way with somewhat uncertain steps, telling me that he had reserved a fine cock bullfinch for the Prior of San Gaggio, and hoped I would do him the favour of taking it to him.

It was now three, and the train left at six. I made various attempts to get away and keep my engagement with my old friend, but no excuse would serve. To say that I had an appointment with the doctor after what I had heard would have been like dealing my hosts a slap in the face, and every stratagem which I devised was vain. I said I wanted to go into the village for cigars, as I had none left; Stelloni offered me half of his. I said I wished to write a post-card; the Secretary informed me I should find the post-office closed, and Sor Cosimo added that he would give me one, and I should write it when we returned from the nets, so that there was nothing for it but to give in.

We had to hurry back, as no one would have dreamed of beginning vespers without Sor Cosimo and Stelloni in the choir. The ladies had a new set of refreshments ready for us when we reached the house; Gostino came to ask when the horse would be wanted, and we set off for the church at increased speed.

---

Returning from church, I saw the doctor in the distance. He signed to me that he hoped we should meet at Florence, and I went on, feeling like a traitor going to execution, who sees his friends in the crowd and cannot speak to or take leave of them....

Gostino had already harnessed the horse, and seeing this I uttered a sigh of satisfaction. Truly, I was in a pitiable state. I could scarcely stand, tired out with the dawdling but continued motion of the whole day; my digestion was upset, for obvious reasons; my head was on fire, and heavy as lead.... Oh, for my own house! But the sigh was abruptly cut short when, just as I was settling myself in the gig, Signora Flavia came calmly up and began to say, while the rest of the household stood motionless to listen—

“See now, as you are so obliging, would you do us a kindness? I have written out all the things, so that you will not forget anything.” And she read out, by the twilight—

“1. To take Sora Amalia’s spectacles to that spectacle-maker at the Canto Alla Paglia, and have the broken glass mended. Gostino has them in his pocket, and will give them to you at the station.

“2. Five mètres, or else seven yards, just as you think best, of stuff like that of your coat; to be sent on Thursday by the carrier——”

“Have you written down the bird-seed, Flavia?”

“I have put down everything. Now be quiet ... by the carrier who puts up just outside the Porta San Frediano, where there is a board with ‘Stabling and coach-house.’”

“And about the wine?” asked Sor Cosimo.

“Here it is. To tell Scatizzi, the wine-seller in Borgognissanti—of course you know him—that if he wants another cartload of the same wine, now is the time.”

“But you’ve forgotten the bird-seed and the bullfinch, after all!” said Don Paolo impatiently.

“Here—now comes your turn.

“4. Three pounds of bird-seed from the man in the little alley which runs from the Via Calzaioli into the Ghetto. Have you put the measure into the box, Gostino?”—

“Yes, ma’am; but please make haste, or we shall be late.”

“5. A bullfinch to be taken to the Prior of San Gaggio.”

“Have you taken it, Gostino?”

“Yes, Master Paolo. He’s tied under the gig.”

“And you’ll remember me to him?” said Don Paolo, “and tell him that I caught fifteen to-day, and he is to send and tell me how his nets are doing.”

“And here,” said Signora Flavia, pointing to a huge bundle tied up at the back of the gig, “I have put together a little country green-stuff for you, as you said you liked it.”

“But I ... really ... Thank you, Signora Flavia, many thanks.”

“And this,” said Signorina Olimpia, approaching, “will you keep this in remembrance of me?” She handed me a sheet of paper folded in four, shook my hand three times over, and wished me a pleasant journey.... The farewells were said, and we were off....

When we had left the village behind us I cast my eye over Signorina Olimpia’s souvenir, and relieved my feelings by one of those hearty laughs which make one feel like a new creature. It was an autograph copy of the sonnet on the ordination of Calamai’s son.

Renato Fucini.

THE THEOREM OF PYTHAGORAS.

“The forty-seventh proposition!” said Professor Roveni, in a tone of mild sarcasm, as he unfolded a paper which I had extracted, very gingerly, from an urn standing on his desk. Then he showed it to the Government Inspector who stood beside him, and whispered something into his ear. Finally, he handed me the document, so that I might read the question with my own eyes.

“Go up to the blackboard,” added the Professor, rubbing his hands.

The candidate who had preceded me in the arduous trial, and had got out of it as best he could, had left the school-room on tiptoe, and, in opening the door, let in a long streak of sunshine, which flickered on wall and floor, and in which I had the satisfaction of seeing my shadow. The door closed again, and the room was once more plunged into twilight. It was a stifling day in August, and the great sun-blinds of blue canvas were a feeble defence against the glass, so that the Venetian shutters had been closed as well. The little light which remained was concentrated on the master’s desk and the blackboard, and was, at any rate, sufficient to illuminate my defeat.

“Go to the blackboard and draw the figure,” repeated Professor Roveni, perceiving my hesitation.

Tracing the figure was the only thing I knew how to do; so I took a piece of chalk and conscientiously went to work. I was in no hurry; the more time I took up in this graphic part, the less remained for oral explanation.

But the Professor was not the man to lend himself to my innocent artifice.

“Make haste,” he said. “You are not going to draw one of Raphael’s Madonnas.”

I had to come to an end.

“Put the letters now. Quick!—you are not giving specimens of handwriting. Why did you erase that G?”

“Because it is too much like the C I have made already. I was going to put an H instead of it.”

“What a subtle idea!” observed Roveni, with his usual irony. “Have you finished?”

“Yes, sir,” said I; adding under my breath, “More’s the pity!”

“Come,—why are you standing there moonstruck? Enunciate the theorem!”

Then began my sorrows. The terms of the question had escaped my memory.

“In a triangle ...” I stammered.

“Go on.”

I took courage and said all I knew.

“In a triangle ... the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides.”

“In any triangle?”

“No, no!” suggested a compassionate soul behind me.

“No, sir!” said I.

“Explain yourself. In what sort of a triangle?”

“A right-angled triangle,” whispered the prompting voice.

“A right-angled triangle,” I repeated, like a parrot.

“Silence there, behind!” shouted the Professor; and then continued, turning to me, “Then, according to you, the big square is equal to each of the smaller ones?”

Good gracious! the thing was absurd. But I had a happy inspiration.

“No, sir, to both of them added together.”

“To the sum then,—say to the sum. And you should say equivalent, not equal. Now demonstrate.”

I was in a cold perspiration—icy cold—despite the tropical temperature. I looked stupidly at the right-angled triangle, the square of the hypothenuse, and its two subsidiary squares; I passed the chalk from one hand to the other and back again, and said nothing, for the very good reason that I had nothing to say.

No one prompted me any more. It was so still you might have heard a pin drop. The Professor fixed his grey eyes on me, bright with a malignant joy; the Government Inspector was making notes on a piece of paper. Suddenly the latter respectable personage cleared his throat, and Professor Roveni said in his most insinuating manner, “Well?”

I did not reply.

Instead of at once sending me about my business, the Professor wished to imitate the cat which plays with the mouse before tearing it to pieces.

“How?” he added. “Perhaps you are seeking a new solution. I do not say that such may not be found, but we shall be quite satisfied with one of the old ones. Go on. Have you forgotten that you ought to produce the two sides, DE, MF, till they meet? Produce them—go on!”

I obeyed mechanically. The figure seemed to attain a gigantic size, and weighed on my chest like a block of stone.

“Put a letter at the point where they meet—an N. So. And now?”

I remained silent.

“Don’t you think it necessary to draw a line down from N through A to the base of the square, BHIC?”

I thought nothing of the kind; however, I obeyed.

“Now you will have to produce the two sides, BH and IC.”

Ouf! I could endure no more.

“Now,” the Professor went on, “a child of two could do the demonstration. Have you nothing to observe with reference to the two triangles, BAC and NAE?”

As silence only prolonged my torture, I replied laconically, “Nothing.”

“In other words, you know nothing at all?”

“I think you ought to have seen that some time ago,” I replied, with a calm worthy of Socrates.

“Very good, very good! Is that the tone you take? And don’t you even know that the theorem of Pythagoras is also called the Asses’ Bridge, because it is just the asses who cannot get past it? You can go. I hope you understand that you have not passed in this examination. That will teach you to read Don Quixote and draw cats during my lessons!”

The Government Inspector took a pinch of snuff; I laid down the chalk and the duster, and walked majestically out of the hall, amid the stifled laughter of my school-fellows.

Three or four comrades who had already passed through the ordeal with no very brilliant result were waiting for me outside.

“Ploughed, then?”

“Ploughed!” I replied, throwing myself into an attitude of heroic defiance; adding presently, “I always said that mathematics were only made for dunces.”

“Of course!” exclaimed one of my rivals.

“What question did you have?” asked another.

“The forty-seventh proposition. What can it matter to me whether the square of the hypothenuse is or is not equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides?”

“Of course it can’t matter to you—nor to me—nor to any one in the world,” chimed in a third with all the petulant ignorance of fourteen. “If it is equal, why do they want to have it repeated so often? and if it is not, why do they bother us with it?”

“Believe me, you fellows,” said I, resuming the discussion with the air of a person of long experience, “you may be quite certain of it, the whole system of instruction is wrong; and as long as the Germans are in the country, it will be so!”

So, being fully persuaded that our failure was a protest against the Austrian dominion, and a proof of vivid and original genius, we went home, where, for my part, I confess I found that the first enthusiasm soon evaporated.

My ignominious failure in this examination had a great influence on my future. Since it was absolutely impossible for me to understand mathematics, it was decided that very day that I was to leave school, especially as the family finances made it necessary for me to begin earning something as soon as might be.

It was the most sensible resolution that could have been come to, and I had no right to oppose it; yet, I confess, I was deeply saddened by it. My aversion to mathematics did not extend to other branches of learning, in which I had made quite a respectable show; and besides, I loved the school. I loved those sacred cloisters which we boys filled with life and noise,—I loved the benches carved with our names,—even the blackboard which had been the witness of my irreparable defeat.

I blamed Pythagoras’ theorem for it all. With some other question—who knows?—I might just have scraped through, by the skin of my teeth, as I had done in past years. But, as Fate would have it, it was just that one!

I dreamt about it all night. I saw it before me—the fatal square with its triangle atop, and the two smaller squares, one sloping to the right, and the other to the left, and a tangle of lines, and a great confusion of letters; and heard beating through my head like the strokes of a hammer—BAC = NAF; RNAB = DEAB.

It was some time before I was free from that nightmare and could forget Pythagoras and his three squares. In the long run, however, Time, who with his sponge wipes out so many things from the book of memory, had nearly effaced this; when, a few weeks ago, the ill-omened figure appeared to me in one of my son’s exercise-books.

“Has this curse been transmitted to my descendants?” I exclaimed. “Poor boy! What if the theorem of Pythagoras should be as fatal to him as it has been to me?”

I thought I would question him about it on his return from school.

“So,” I began gravely, “you have already reached the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid in your geometry?”

“Yes, father,” he replied simply.

“A difficult theorem,” I added, shaking my head.

“Do you think so?” he asked with a smile.

“Oh! you want to boast and make me think you find it easy?”

“But I do find it easy.”

“I should like to see you try it”—the words slipped out almost involuntarily. “It’s no use—I can’t bear vanity and boasting.”

“At once,” replied the dauntless youth. And action succeeded words. He took a piece of paper and a pencil, and quickly traced the cabalistic figure.

“As for demonstrations,” he began, “there are plenty to choose from. Is it all the same to you which I take?”

“Yes,” I replied mechanically. In fact it had to be all the same to me. If there had been a hundred demonstrations I should not have known one from the other.

“Then we’ll take the most usual one,” my mathematician went on; and proceeded to produce the lines which Professor Roveni, of respected memory, had made me produce twenty-seven years before, and, with the accents of the sincerest conviction, prepared to prove to me that the triangle BAC was equal to the triangle NAF, and so on.

“And now,” said my son, when he had finished, “we can, if you wish, arrive at the same conclusion in another way.”

“For pity’s sake!” I exclaimed in terror, “since we have reached the journey’s end, let us rest.”

“But I am not tired.”

Not even tired! Was the boy an embryo Newton? And yet people talk about the principle of heredity!

“I suppose you are at the top of your class in mathematics,” I said, not untouched by a certain reverential awe.

“No, no,” he replied. “There are two better than I. Besides, you know very well that everybody—except downright asses—understands the forty-seventh proposition.”

“Except downright asses!” After twenty-seven years I heard, from the lips of my own son, almost the very identical words which Professor Roveni had used on the memorable day of the examination. And this time they were heightened by the savage irony of the added “You know very well!”

I wished to save appearances, and added in haste—

“Of course I know that. I was only in fun. I hope you would not be such a fool as to be proud of a small thing like that.”

Meanwhile, however, my Newton had repented of his too sweeping assertion.

“After all,” he went on, with some embarrassment, “there are some who never attend to their lesson, and then ... even if they are not asses....”

It seemed to me that he was offering me a loophole of escape, and with a sudden impulse of candour—

“That must be the way of it,” I said. “I suppose I never paid attention.”

“How! You?” exclaimed my boy, reddening to the roots of his hair. Yet ... I would bet something that, at the bottom of his heart, he was longing to laugh.

I put my hand over his mouth.

“Hush,” I said; “we will not pursue our inquiries into detail.”

Well, the Theorem of Pythagoras has, as you see, cost me a new and very serious humiliation. In spite of this, I no longer keep up the old grudge. There will never be any confidence between us, but I consider it as a family friend whom we must not treat with rudeness, though he may not be personally congenial to ourselves.

Enrico Castelnuovo.

AN ECCENTRIC ORDERLY.

Of originals there is a great variety under the canopy of heaven; and I have enjoyed the acquaintance of several, but among them all I never met his match.

He was a Sardinian peasant, twenty years old, unable to read or write, and a private in an infantry regiment.

The first time I saw him, at Florence, in the office of a military journal, he inspired me with a certain sympathy. I soon understood, however, from his looks and some of his answers, that he was a character. His very appearance was paradoxical: seen in front, he was one man; looked at in profile, he was another. Of the full face there was nothing particular to remark; it was a countenance like any other; but it seemed as though in the act of turning his head he became a different man, and the profile had something irresistibly ludicrous about it. The point of his chin and the tip of his nose seemed to be trying to meet, and to be hindered by an enormous thick-lipped mouth which was always open, and showed two rows of teeth, uneven as a file of national guards. His eyes were scarcely larger than pin-heads, and disappeared altogether among the wrinkles into which his face was puckered when he laughed. His eyebrows were shaped like two circumflex accents, and his forehead was scarcely high enough to keep his hair out of his eyes. A friend of mine remarked to me that he seemed to be one of Nature’s practical jokes. And yet his face expressed intelligence and good-nature; but an intelligence which was, so to speak, sporadic, and a good-nature entirely sui generis. He spoke, in a harsh, hoarse voice, an Italian for which he had every right to claim the inventor’s patent.

“How do you like Florence?” I asked, seeing that he had arrived in that city the day before.

“It’s not bad,” he replied.

Coming from a man who had previously only seen Cagliari, and one or two small towns in Northern Italy, the answer seemed to savour of a certain austerity.

“Do you like Florence or Bergamo best?”

“I arrived yesterday—I couldn’t say yet.”

The following day he made his entry into my quarters.

During the first week I was more than once within an ace of losing all patience, and sending him back to the regiment. If he had contented himself with understanding nothing, I could have let that pass, but the misfortune was, that partly through the difficulty he had in understanding my Italian, partly through the unaccustomed nature of his tasks, he understood about half, and did everything the wrong way. Were I to relate how he carried my razors to the publisher, and my manuscripts ready for the press to the razor grinder; how he left a French novel with the shoemaker, and a pair of boots to be mended at a lady’s house, no one who had not seen him would believe me. But I cannot refrain from relating one or two of his most marvellous exploits.

At eleven in the forenoon—which was the time when the morning papers were cried about the streets—it was my custom to send him out for some ham for my breakfast. One morning, knowing that there was an item in the paper that I wished to see, I said to him hurriedly, “Quick! the ham, and the Corriere Italiano.” He could never take in two distinct ideas at once. He went out, and returned shortly afterwards with the ham wrapped up in the Corriere.

One morning he was present when I was showing one of my friends a splendid military atlas, which I had borrowed from the library; and he heard me remark to the latter: “The mischief is that one cannot see all these maps at a glance, and has to examine each one separately. To follow the whole course of a battle I should like to have them nailed up on the wall in their proper order, so as to form a single diagram.” On coming in that evening—I shudder still when I think of it—all the maps in that atlas were neatly nailed to the wall; and, to add to my sufferings, he appeared before me next morning, with the modestly complacent smile of the man who expects a compliment.

But all this is nothing to what I underwent before I had succeeded in teaching him to put my rooms in order—I do not say as I wanted them—but in a manner remotely suggesting the presence of a rational being. For him, the supreme art of putting things to rights consisted in piling them one on top of the other, and his great ambition was to build them up into structures of the greatest possible altitude. During the first few days of his tenure of office my books formed a semicircle of towers, which trembled at the lightest breath; the washhand basin, turned upside down, sustained a daring pyramid of plates, cups, and saucers, at the top of which my shaving-brush was planted; and my hats, new and old, rose, in the form of a triumphal pillar, to a dizzy height. As a consequence there occurred—usually at dead of night—ruinous collapses, which made a noise like a small earthquake, and scattered my property to such an extent that, if it had not been for the walls of the room, no one knows where it would have brought up. To make him understand that my tooth-brush did not belong to the genus hair-brush, and that the pomade-jar was not the same as the vessel which contained Liebig’s extract, required the eloquence of Cicero and the patience of Job.

I have never been able to understand whether my attempts to treat him kindly met with any response on his part. Once only he showed a certain solicitude for my personal welfare, and this was exhibited in a manner quite peculiar to himself. I had been ill in bed for about a fortnight, and neither got worse nor showed any signs of recovery. One evening he stopped the doctor—an exceedingly touchy man—on the stairs, and asked him, abruptly, “But, once for all, are you going to cure him, or are you not?” The doctor lost his temper, and fairly blew him up. “It’s only that it’s lasting rather long,” was my orderly’s sole response.

It is difficult to give any idea of the language he spoke—a mixture of Sardinian, Lombard, and Italian, with idioms all his own; elliptical sentences, mutilated and contracted words, verbs in the infinitive flung about haphazard. The whole was like the talk of a man in delirium. At the end of five or six months, by dint of attending the regimental schools, he learnt, to my misfortune, to read and write after a fashion. While I was out of the house he used to practise writing at my table, and would write the same word a couple of hundred times over. Usually it was a word he had heard me pronounce when reading, and which, for some reason or other, had made an impression on him. One day, for instance, he was struck by the name of Vercingetorix. When I came home in the evening I found Vercingetorix written on the margins of the newspapers, on the backs of my proofs, on the wrappers of my books, on my letters, on the scraps in the waste-paper basket—in every place where he could find room for the thirteen letters beloved of his heart. Another day the word Ostrogoths touched his soul, and on the next my rooms were invaded by the Ostrogoths. In like manner, a little later, the place was full of rhinoceroses.

On the other hand, I was so far a gainer by this extension of knowledge on his part, that I was no longer obliged to mark with crosses, in differently coloured chalks, the notes I gave him to deliver to various people. There was no way of making him remember the names; but he got to know my correspondents as the blue lady, the black journalist, the yellow Government official, etc.

Speaking of writing, I discovered a habit of his, much more curious than the one I have mentioned. He had bought himself a note-book, into which he copied, from every book that fell into his hands, the author’s dedication to his parents or relations, taking care always to substitute for the names of the latter those of his father, his mother, and his brothers, to whom he imagined he was thus giving a brilliant proof of affection and gratitude. One day I opened this book and read, among others, the following:—“Pietro Tranci (the Sardinian peasant, his father), born in poverty, acquired, by study and perseverance, a distinguished place among men of learning, assisted his parents and brothers, and worthily educated his children. To the memory of his excellent father this book is dedicated by the author, Antonio Tranci”—instead of Michele Lessona.

On another page he had copied the dedication of Giovanni Prati’s poems, beginning as follows:—“To Pietro Tranci, my father, who, announcing to the Subalpine Parliament the disaster of Novara, fell fainting to the ground and died within a few days, I consecrate this song,” etc., etc.

What astonished me most in one who had seen so little was an absolute lack of the feeling of wonder. During the time he was at Florence he saw the festivities at Prince Humbert’s marriage, the opera, and the dancing at the Pergola (he had never been inside a theatre in his life), the Carnival, and the fantastic illumination of the Celli Avenue. He saw a hundred other things which were quite new to him, and which ought, one would think, to have surprised him, amused him, made him talk. Nothing of the sort. His admiration never went beyond the formula, “Not bad!” Santa Maria del Fiore—not bad! Giotto’s tower—not bad! the Pitti Palace—not bad! I really believe that if the Creator in person had asked what he thought of the universe he would have replied that it was not bad.

From the first day of his stay to the last his mood never changed; he continually preserved a kind of cheerful seriousness: always obedient, always muddle-headed, always most conscientious in understanding things the wrong way, always plunged in a kind of apathetic beatitude, always with the same extravagance of eccentricity. On the day when his term of service expired he scribbled away for several hours in his note-book with the same calm as on other days. Before leaving he came to say good-bye to me. There was not much tenderness in our parting. I asked him if he was sorry to leave Florence. He answered, “Why not?” I asked him if he was glad to return home. He replied with a grimace which I did not understand.

“If you ever want anything, sir,” he said at the last moment, “write to me, and I shall always be pleased to do anything I can for you.”

“Many thanks,” I replied.

And so he left the house, after being with me over two years, without the slightest sign either of regret or pleasure.

I looked after him as he went downstairs.

Suddenly he turned round.

“Ah!” thought I, “now we shall see! His heart has been awakened. He is coming back to take leave in a different sort of way!”

Instead of which—

“Lieutenant,” he said, “your shaving-brush is in the drawer of the biggest table, sir!”

With that he disappeared.

Edmondo de Amicis.

A PROVINCIAL ORACLE.

... The newly-married couple settled in a small country town, where they were not long in gaining the hearts of all the inhabitants. The more sensible and influential people in the place thought the advent of such wealthy residents a great piece of good fortune. “They will be of so much advantage to the place,” was the remark made in the chemist’s shop of an evening. It soon began to rain advantages: dinner parties, picnics, gifts, patronage, entertainments for charitable objects—hospitalities of all sorts; and then the balls at carnival-tide! A dash, a gaiety, a profusion that one could neither believe nor imagine—a splendour, the memory of which, as all the local journals put it, “would flourish with perennial vigour in the hearts of a grateful community.” We thought we had returned to the very flower of the golden age of Arcadia. It was two talents, more especially, which won golden opinions for Signor Diego among the worthy citizens of our little borough—his magnificent expenditure and his wit. Of Attic salt he had as much as sufficed, within a very short space of time, to pickle the whole place; whereby it became one of the wittiest towns in the world. I do not say that the inhabitants did not possess a great deal of wit before he arrived; nor do I wish to hint that the conversation of the educated persons who visited at the house of Diego was mere insipid triviality coloured with a little presumption, and that touch of perfidy which is, so to speak, the sauce piquante of empty gossip. No, indeed! for they, too, took their share in public life and talked politics, speaking highly of themselves and of the party in power, and exceedingly ill of those who were not present to hear them. But what I mean is that Signor Diego, profiting by all that he had learnt in his travels, showed them a more excellent—that is to say, a more Parisian way, and taught them the great mystery of chic. He instructed them in all those arts of gilding and veneering, by means of which the most contemptible trifles may be made to appear noble and graceful. He taught them to laugh at serious matters, but to take the most religious care—practising the worship of themselves with unheard-of austerity and entire self-devotion—of their hair and their coats, and the dignity of their attitudes and movements; and to pronounce sentence with the extremest rigour on the unfortunate who should transgress the least important of the rules established by social etiquette.

Mario Pratesi.

DOCTOR PHŒBUS.

Many years ago a company, with capital to back it, took a lease of the manganese mines in the province of Valle Amena. Perhaps the “Pleasant Valley” may at one time have deserved its name; but nowadays there is nothing pleasant about the monotonous barren hills, of no use to any one but the goats, and the distant woods, too scanty to lend any tint of green to the dry and desert landscape. The company’s employés were scarcely to be blamed for not liking the place; everything was scarce, even pretty faces—at least such as had had the benefit of soap and water. But the pay was good, and more than one among them had hopes of becoming a shareholder, or at least cashier; and so things went on somehow or other. Two hundred navvies pushed the work rapidly forward, and enormous trucks full of the grey metal blocked the postal road day and night.

But all that glitters is not gold; and one day the report spread that the flourishing company had failed, as though prosperity had undermined its foundations like stagnant water. It made a great talk in the neighbourhood, and every one concluded his or her comments by long exclamations of astonishment.

“Mah!” ejaculated the old, dried-up chaplain of the Misericordia,[^[18]] with his hands in the pockets of the threadbare shooting-coat which he always wore except when he put on his surplice to go and fetch the dead. “In my opinion it was just like when a set of people leave the gaming-table, where low cards have been dealt; but they do not all leave with the same advantages.”

“There is no getting at the exact truth,” remarked the landlord of the village inn, who did not repent nearly so much of his sins as he did of having given credit; “but in this business I too believe that the rogues have done the honest men who trust their neighbours, and never suspect any cheating.”

“What nonsense!” exclaimed Signor Vincenzino; and perhaps he would have said more, only that, being syndic, and very rich, he thought it possible he might be risking the chance of a decoration. He rose from his seat in the Caffé del Giappone. “In any case,” he continued, keeping his back turned to the host, “there is the law.”

“I’d like to see it!” replied mine host. “But it’s very seldom that rogues who have grown rich do not find some one to help them, in one way or another, in keeping what they have stolen.”

“Precisely!” retorted the chaplain, holding up his finger like Dante under the Uffizi. “There are certain experts and certain lawyers who show a most extraordinary ability in this respect, and acquire enormous credit, so that sometimes the Government is even forced to raise them to the rank of Commendatore. You alone, poor Phœbus...”

And so on, and so on.... It would be tedious to repeat all the conversation that took place at the Caffé del Giappone. As to Phœbus, however, I should not be altogether disposed to agree with the chaplain. If Phœbus found no one to make the best of the arguments on his side when—having been blinded by the effects of an explosion at the works—he asked for a miserable little pension, which the Company refused, saying that his misfortune was due to his own carelessness, and not to the necessities of his work,—if, I say, he had no one to plead his cause, this must be regarded merely as an accident, which happened to him, as it may happen to hundreds of others in a like condition. Then came the crash; and if a company were going to give every man what he wants, what motive could it have for declaring itself insolvent. In this case, to recommend the fulfilment of any humane duties is like running after a mist-wreath, or asking a routed army, in full retreat, to think of the dead and wounded they are leaving behind.

I do not deny that the consequences were certainly unpleasant for Phœbus, who had now eaten nothing for three days, and sat in the chimney-corner, yawning and stretching his arms to such an amazing extent, first in one direction, and then in another, that he looked like the castle of St. Angelo when the fireworks are being let off on Easter Day. A miserable hen, which sat motionless, not daring to attract attention to itself, and a cat which seemed to have nothing more to wish for in this life, having now reached the very utmost degree of leanness, and lay curled up, with half-closed eyes, on the dead ashes of the hearth, were the only creatures not audibly complaining in the melancholy darkness of the hut, which covered so much misery. It seemed as though they were meditating on the infinite vanity of things. But not so Phœbus’s wife, nor Vittorino, his little son; for the one, by continual whimpering, and the other with her reproaches, added notes of sickening despair to the symphony of those sonorous, expansive, and well-nourished yawns of the blind man. Yet the wife had not the slightest reason for envying the cat; she was dry and thin as though she had nothing left for hunger and grief to gnaw at;—she was near her confinement, poor soul, and, with her face the colour of sodden dead leaves, and her black eyes, greedy, feverishly bright, and sunken in their sockets, she was a very different person from the comely young Rosalinda whom Phœbus had married when he returned from serving in the Bersaglieri. That was six months before the accident at the quarries; and now she was more like one of the thirsty, dropsical wretches in Dante’s “Malebolge.”

“Go to Sor Vincenzino,” said Phœbus.

His wife did not reply.

“Go to the doctor.”

“Don’t you know that a hundred poor sinners might die before either of them would stir a finger? Don’t you know that the doctor keeps on asking me for a franc for that tooth he pulled out last year?”

Phœbus moved his jaws for a little while, like an animal chewing the cud; then he gave seven or eight more yawns, and rubbed his hands as if he had just concluded a good stroke of business.

“Go to Nannone—go to the chaplain, to the archdeacon, to Lisetta—only go to some one!”

“I went to Nannone this morning—he was not at home. I went to the chaplain yesterday, and he gave me that bread. I went to Lisetta the day before yesterday, and she gave me that polenta. And who’s going to the archdeacon’s, with that vixen of a Modesta there? Not I!”

“Then, you ugly slug, you cannot be hungry, and must just eat your own talk!”

The wife rose, sobbing and muttering curses, and went out, dragging the water-jar with her as usual, as an excuse for knocking at people’s doors. When they opened, however, it was something more than permission to draw water at the well that she wanted—her errand was more serious than that.

To-day she did not find them disposed to listen to tales of misery, for it was the last day of the carnival, and the weather was bright and clear. A cold wind kept the sky cloudless, and the sun, going down in the west, seemed to embrace the whole sky and earth with its rays, and smiled among the shadows and on the peaks of the snowy Apennines, which gradually faded away into the distance on the last clear rim of the horizon. But the village, all but the great ruined tower on the little piazza, the upper part of which was still in light, began to grow dark; and it was already dusk in the ancient, narrow streets, black as if after a conflagration, filled with crowds of country folk, among which the red shawls of the jolly peasant women made bright points here and there, and noisy with cymbals and other instruments, laughter, and shouting.

This, then, was not a propitious moment. In fact, Rosalinda was not long in returning, with her pitcher and her hands both empty. The people, nearly all poor, were tired of her continual requests, and by this time the pitcher trick was becoming stale.

“Eh!” said her husband, rubbing his hands as usual. “I suppose they would not open their doors to you, because it is winter, and they are afraid of the cold coming in?”

“Be quiet!” screamed Rosalinda to the child. “Be quiet, or I’ll make an end of you!”

“Be quiet, Vittorino,” repeated Phœbus. “This evening we shall have twenty loaves and some roast meat! Wife! you be quiet too, and give me those things that ought to be in the box!”

The things were a heap of rags, on the top of which lay a worn-out tall hat, very old, but seeming still to remember its former owner; for to those who had never seen him in any other hat for years and years it was impossible not to be instantly reminded of that wrinkled, benevolent, patient face, whose serious sadness was rather added to than diminished by the somewhat long chin and Dantesque nose. The other things—a waistcoat, knee-breeches, and a very long black overcoat—had very evidently belonged to an extremely poor and unfortunate priest.

But Vittorino began to laugh and dance when he saw his father put on not only this Court suit, as it seemed to him, which his wife handed him, grumbling and crying at the same time, but a pair of huge horse-hair whiskers and an enormous paper collar, the points of which reached nearly to the tip of his nose.

Not only this, but a wave of merriment ran through the whole village, like the ripple which a puff of wind makes in the surface of the lagoon, when Phœbus issued from his door thus dressed, with a huge book containing the whole series of ancient medical prescriptions under his arm. Some people insisted on recognising in his icy smile, in those remedies so learnedly prescribed in his slow, pompous manner, in that awkward, straddling walk, Doctor Ambrogio, the village physician for forty years, who was also surgeon, veterinary surgeon, and dentist. As dentist his renown had attracted people from the remotest villages; and for the expense and trouble he had undergone to acquire it he expected compensation even from the poor, though in justice it must be said (and this shows Doctor Ambrogio’s fair-mindedness), much less than from the rich.

Other masks made a cheerful variation in the crowd—stenterelli,[^[19]] with painted faces and pigtails curled up like a point of interrogation, harlequins, Turks, madmen, wizards, and big, bearded creatures got up as nurses, and carrying turkeys swathed up in baby-clothes; which birds, pushing their red-wattled heads out from among the bandages, never imagined—though they seemed astonished and confused enough already—the slaughter which was to befall them later on. The women, with bright eyes and laughing lips, hung over each other’s shoulders, in the windows and on the balconies, to get a sight of Phœbus. Only when he began to give utterance to certain jokes at which no girl—and not even a married woman—can very well laugh in public, then they knitted their brows, while the men, looking at them, laughed fit to kill themselves. Then his popularity grew; then it seemed as though Plenty thought fit to empty her cornucopia over Phœbus; then the public liberality knew no limits, and down were showered steaks, and bread, and sausages, and polpette,[^[20]] and maritozzi,[^[21]] and ballotte,[^[22]] and strozza-prete,[^[23]] and apples, and schiacciatunta,[^[24]] and rosemary cake, and millet puddings—all poured on the devoted head of Phœbus, who, without putting the smallest morsel into his mouth, stuffed the whole into the front of his waistcoat, into his hat, and into all the pockets of his overcoat and trousers.

Yet none the less did he continue to look like Famine, or Lent personified, come to play the fool in the midst of all that courteous and kindly merriment. The clumsy black spectacles—with the glasses broken and mended with black sealing-wax—with which he covered the horrible sight presented by his burnt eyes, seemed of themselves to darken him, and take away every touch of life and mobility from his worn face, white as old wax, which might have been taken for that of an old man or one far gone in consumption, if it had not been for the intensely black hair, and the figure, which, though below the middle height, was broad in the chest, and all muscles and sinews. If his hair had been white he would not have moved people’s compassion so much as he did when they saw him still fresh and robust; for thus his lot appeared peculiarly unjust and cruel, paralysing his strong arms, and robbing him of so many years of ease gained by hard labour, and reducing him instead to the necessity of asking alms, which were so limited, and not always kindly given. Nevertheless, on account of that habit he had of smiling and rubbing his hands when speaking, many people thought him a merry and light-hearted man who was fond of his joke.

The shouting crowd hustled him out on the little square, where rises the gloomy tower—at that moment lit up by the last rays of the sun, with the hawks wheeling, in the blue sky, round the top.

Doctor Ambrogio, standing at the door of the chemist’s shop, looked like Æsculapius himself, with his ruddy, well-nourished face, full of severe learning, and his long white beard, under which appeared, wound several times round his neck, a heavy scarlet woollen scarf. If this physician, who was great at blood-letting and cupping, had remained a little behind the times, the chemist had by no means done so; and in this instance the old and the new generation joined hands. For the chemist, emulous of his city colleagues, had sold to a Florentine dealer in antiquities the phials and vases of glazed terra-cotta and the dried Nile crocodile, which, hanging with widely-opened jaws from the middle of the ceiling, had formerly given an uncanny idea of medical science and the apothecary’s art, as though they had been devouring monsters. Moreover, he had decorated his shop with all the latest improvements—gilt boxes and ornamental stoppers, chalybeate water, and purgative syrups enclosed in cut-glass bottles; and he never sold an ounce of cream of tartar or bitter salts without doing it up in a little bag of glazed paper. All this elegance certainly raised the price of his commodities; but only consider how much it added to the efficiency of the drugs!

Here, right in front of this luxurious establishment, Phœbus stood still, in the midst of the crowd, opened his book, turned over the pages, and after discoursing for some time, concluded by prescribing Dr. Ambrogio, who was still standing in the doorway, and who suffered from sciatica, a decoction of asinine cucumber.

Dr. Ambrogio turned his back, closed the glass door, and said to Sor Vincenzino, who was seated on the sofa reading the paper: “This blind man is a public nuisance, and I cannot think why you don’t get him out of the way. If I were syndic....”

“If you were syndic you would know what red-tape and difficulties and formalities are! Last year I tried to send him to the hospital for the blind at ..., and they sent him back because he was not a native of the place.”

“Yes, I remember. I gave him as full a certificate as I could to get him away from here. Good heavens! If this town is not a nest of wretchedness, I don’t know what is.”

The chaplain, who was also in the shop waiting for the chemist, seemed touched to the quick, and said—

“It is the fault of the rich. If the rich were to think more about giving work——”

But the doctor interrupted him.

“Here we are with the rich again! Can’t you understand, sir, that the rich have too many taxes?” The syndic nodded approvingly. “It’s the Government that’s in fault,” said the doctor. “Here’s the dilemma, and there’s no getting out of it:—Either they ought to take off the income-tax, or they, and not we, should see to the feeding of these starving wretches.”

“Very true! Just the thing I have so often thought,” answered the syndic. “Because if they were to take off the income-tax, that sum would remain in the treasury; but it cannot remain there, because the funds have to be turned to account; and for doing this labour is needed, and labour being needed it has to be paid for, and being paid for, why, there you are. Then people have something to eat! Why, that’s quite clear, gentlemen! No difficulty in understanding that!”

“There was no need for your explanation,” returned the chaplain, shrugging his shoulders with a slightly vexed look as he rose from the sofa, stretching out his legs, which appeared, long and thin as those of a blackbird, under the skirts of his wretched coat. “Even the poor countess paid income-tax; yet at the end of the year she had spent a pretty large sum in good works. But her heirs have inherited her money and not her merciful heart.”

“That is just the sort of speech you might be expected to make, belonging as you do to the Misericordia,” said the doctor, with a quietly contemptuous smile.

“And a ruined man into the bargain!” whispered Sor Vincenzino into the doctor’s ear. “Later on, some time, I’ll tell you a little story about his niece.”

“Throwing away one’s own money in that fashion,” the doctor went on, with a solemn air of wisdom, “is not charity; it is merely carrying out the whims of hysteria; and the countess was hysterical from the tip of her great toe to the ends of her hair. It’s a question of organisation. You’re far behind the times, chaplain!”

“You had better take care. I may be in advance of you!”

“Everything may be; but that there ought to be methods and limits even in charity, for otherwise even great fortunes would fall into ruin, this indisputable and precious axiom of economic science, I am afraid—excuse me—you are not acquainted with. And with interest, you know, there is no joking.”

Sor Vincenzino concluded his approving nods by one of final and comprehensive assent; and wishing to convey clearly to the chaplain that, in short, he thought nothing of him, he turned his back on him, and set himself, with a diplomatic countenance, to meditate over his newspaper. The chaplain understood that, and with his simple face full of grave sadness, and his white hair curling over his temples, remained standing, waiting patiently for the medicine for his poor, pretty niece, who was ill. The doctor kept looking out of the window, and saying to himself, “I should like to know what has become of the police! They ought to make an example and dismiss them both! If I saw one of them I’d tell him to make that rascal hold his tongue!”

“To-day I cure every one for nothing!” Doctor Phœbus was shouting in the midst of the crowd. “To-morrow it will be too late! Yes, it will be too late, unhappy people! If you have not enough to live upon—if you do not pay me a proper fee for every visit—if you don’t want to pay a high price for medicines, and buy them here of my good friend the chemist, who is the only man who sells good ones—why then, unhappy wretches, you can be no patients of mine! Then you will have to go to the hospital—our hospital!—where he who goes in never comes out any more! What with fasting, and poultices, and gruel without salt, mallow-water and cuppings, in a week you will either be cured or gone where you want no more curing.”

At this point the last glimmer of the fiery sunset, the sound of the great church bell, and the rattle of a drum which was going round announcing the “Last Wonderful Comedy of the Burattini,” distracted the audience. A man slipped out of the Caffé del Giappone, in the dusk, with baking-pan full of pastry, just out of the oven, and hastened to carry it to the Casino for the evening’s festivity. It was duly evident from all the going and coming that there were great things in the air. Not only at the Casino, but there was to be dancing at Sora Carmelinda’s and at Sor Gregorio’s; there was to be dancing at the taverns, in the space between the wine-casks, and in the hay-lofts at the farms; for all which occasions there had been secretly stored up in every house masks and half-masks and papier-mâché noses, in which one could be perfectly certain of not being recognised. Time was pressing; the drum had ceased to beat and the bell to ring, and instead one could hear stray barrel-organs, to whose sound little companies of peasants came trooping in along the dark lanes; and here and there, scattered through the streets of the merry little town, the shouting and laughter which had previously been all concentrated in the square. Then Phœbus found that he had been left alone, in a deeper darkness than before. He stretched out his numbed hands in order to give them a joyful rub; but the long tight overcoat, now stuffed out with the bounty showered on him, got in his way; he tried to stoop and to raise his arms, but this too was a failure. He was impatient to get home quickly, and instead of being able to do so he was forced to grope his way slowly along those noisy streets, where he could scarcely find room to set his stick down.

“Wife! Vittorino! help! I can get no farther! Wife! Come and help me unload the casks full of presents my patients have given me!” he began to shout when he was a few paces from the house.

His wife and Vittorino hurried to meet him, and relieved him of his load in a twinkling; and having entered the house, all three ate like wolves, finding, moreover, here and there among the spoils, a piece of cod’s head or a rotten apple, flung for a joke, which were thankfully received by the cat and the hen, now awakened; so provident is Nature.

Then, unluckily, Phœbus said to his wife, “This evening, at least, dear, you are not going to complain!” Alas! it was like putting the match to the powder-magazine. She had been quiet; but the words seemed to set her going afresh, and she began again—shrieks, tears, and lamentations; how much reason she had for complaining, and how much for thinking of the next day, and how much better it would have been if she had always remained single.

Then Phœbus began, in good earnest, to blaspheme like a heretic, in the brutal Tuscan way. Yet, being quick-witted and kind-hearted beyond the average, he understood that such a burst of temper, after all anxiety had been removed by so abundant a supper, could only have been caused by the state of her health; and he resisted the temptation of bringing her to her senses by a good beating. Instead of that, he shuddered, pitied her, and sat down comfortably in the chimney-corner without saying another word.

But poor little Vittorino, cheered by the unaccustomed supper, began to sing and jump about in that gloomy den, just like a bird which has seen the sun rise. Only the poor woman felt as if her nerves were being torn to pieces by the noise; and she thought the child, young as he was, ought to have understood that there was cause rather for crying than laughing. Then he began to cry; but that, also, would not do; he was to be quiet and not let himself be heard in any way. The child obeyed with a sigh, and the mother then took him in her arms, soothing, petting, and kissing him. But these caresses of his mother’s, who was sobbing after having beaten him (the blind man was singing to himself the whole time), could not draw a smile from him; tired out and very serious, he fell asleep in her arms, and she laid him down on the ghastly mattress and stretched herself beside him. And after that there was nothing more to be seen or heard in the room....

They were all asleep, even Phœbus, who loved sleep because it gave him back his liberty. By day, when he was awake, there was always a cloud surrounding him, and he fancied that he had to bore his way through it, as a mole bores through the ground, to find the sun he had lost. But that dark path went on and on, and never came to an end; it was only in the darkness of night that he could even see the sun again, when he slept and dreamed that he was no longer blind, but could move about freely as before, with his eyes open and seeing. Then he saw them all again—not his little Vittorino, for the child had been born since his misfortune, and the father had never looked on his bright eyes and pretty features; but his wife, and his parents, and his mates, and sometimes lovely distant landscapes that he had never seen before.... He had never had such beautiful dreams before he became blind....

But that night he did not sleep sound, for a hand shook him roughly as he sat in the dark corner of the hearth, and recalled him to the reality of things—namely, to the belfry tower to ring the bells, according to orders received from the archdeacon, from eleven o’clock to midnight, in order to announce the beginning of Lent, and warn people against breaking in on the fast and vigil.

At the command, then, of Phœbus, still masquerading as the doctor, two beggars, acting as his subordinates, who had already entered the tower and seized the bell-ropes, began bending their backs and rising again to the swing of the bells—a “double” so loud and eloquent in the gloomy silence as to reach even the most distant cabins, where some ancient oaks marked the boundary of the parish. But for a great many the bells tolled in vain. Nay, some masks even went and stood under the archdeacon’s windows, making unseemly noises, howling and whistling with the intention of annoying him. And in some hay-lofts the young men, laughing at the remonstrances of the old and the continued tolling of the bells, kept up the dancing till daybreak, amid the smoke of the pipes and the sawing of the violins. The girls, it is true, were somewhat recalcitrant; but with a few scruples of conscience and a little remorse, they let themselves be whirled away, after a while, willingly enough.

After ringing for an hour, Phœbus, hearing the archdeacon’s maid-servant call him from a window, entered, with his companion, the corridor of that dignitary’s house, and having cautiously knocked at a door, was told to come in. They entered a large room lit by an old-fashioned brass lamp. Facing the door, at a little round table, smoking and sipping punch, after having finished their game at chess, sat the good archdeacon, a jolly man of portly presence, verging upon seventy; Cavalier Vincenzino, the syndic, with bye-laws and civic enactments clearly written on the folds of his brow and the curves of his mouth; and the preaching friar, an elderly and hypocritical Franciscan, with red hair and a round face, who had arrived that very day to preach the Lenten sermons. When Phœbus and his companions entered, the friar hid his modest little pipe in his wide sleeve, and produced instead a snuff-box,[^[25]] from which he immediately offered a pinch to the syndic and the archdeacon, who readily accepted. The archdeacon, seeing Phœbus appear before him in that burlesque costume, and with that crushed and battered chimney-pot hat, threw back the tassel of his black skull-cap, which was dangling close to his left ear, and nearly choked himself with laughter. Modesta, the maid, who made a glorious entry, carrying a large dish of steaming meat-dumplings, hastened to set them down on the other table, which was ready laid in the middle of the room, so that she might scratch her head and laugh, like her master—or even louder and longer. This pleased neither the preaching friar nor the syndic, and they whispered together, looking deeply scandalised.

“Persicomele!”[^[26]] exclaimed the archdeacon, “are you going about masked after the stroke of twelve? And what sort of a costume might this be?”

“It is the costume of a doctor of medicine!”

“Dear archdeacon, my dear sir!” said the Franciscan, pointing at Phœbus, “this suit of clothes has belonged to a priest; do you not see the black stockings, the knee-breeches, the waistcoat? Archdeacon, it is not the proper thing to let the clothes of the clergy be seen in a masquerade.”

“Persicomele!” exclaimed the archdeacon, looking more closely, as he passed his hand over his knees, as if dusting his breeches. “Who gave you these clothes?”

“The chaplain!”

“Good! very good!” exclaimed the syndic, chuckling with delight, but he immediately resumed the calm, severe, and munificent aspect of the person who has to sign municipal edicts.

“It seems impossible that, at the present day, certain priests should have so little respect for their cloth!” said the Franciscan indignantly. “Fatal effects, my dear sir!...” And he took an enormous pinch of snuff, with both hands.

“You must not believe, reverend father,” replied the syndic, with some heat, “that the chaplain gives the law to our commune; he is a——”

“Sir!” exclaimed the archdeacon.

“But you don’t know——”

“I don’t want to know. The chaplain is a priest, and that’s enough! Find me another who for 260 francs will take the services of the Misericordia the whole year round, who will go ten or twelve miles on foot, in the depth of winter, or in the dog-days, to attend a funeral, and that with seventy years on his back! And then he has all his brother’s family to keep—seven persons! But you were only joking, Cavalier!—so never mind, let it pass.... And as for you, you blind rascal, I must speak to you again about this. You had no business to go masquerading in these clothes, which were given you in charity. To-morrow, I shall tell the chaplain to take them away from you again!”

“What a pity!” thought Doctor Phœbus to himself; “I was going to make the overcoat into a nice jacket to wear only on feast-days!”

“But, to make a short story of it,” resumed the archdeacon after some moments of anxious silence, “what did you come here for—eh?”

“We came to see whether it is time for the polpette.”

“The polpette are on the table; sit down, therefore, and eat.”

“Fair and softly,” exclaimed one of the guests a little later, giving Phœbus a tremendous nudge with his elbow.

“Blind man, you’re going too fast!” cried the archdeacon, looking at him.

“May I lose my sight if I have eaten more than two!”

“Two!—you’ve eaten a dozen!”

“The blind man has a good appetite! Well, there’s no harm—his teeth will stand it!” said Modesta, who was seated close by, counting the mouthfuls.

“Well then, Modesta, my dear,” said Phœbus, “when his reverence says, ‘Modesta, give the blind man a piece of bread and some meat, poor fellow!’ why do you give me nothing but little dry crusts and cheese-parings? Do you take me for a mouse, Modesta?”

“Blind man, blind man, you are never satisfied!”

“Bless your reverence!” said Modesta, “it would take a great deal to satisfy him!”

“Nay, ’twould take little enough. I would be quite content if I had the sight of my eyes again.”

“Good luck to you!” exclaimed the syndic at last, after having for some time looked on in admiring silence at the process of mastication and deglutition. “The like of us would be dead in three days if they ate in that fashion!”

“Just try a little abstinence!” said Doctor Phœbus. “Try living all the year round on wild herbs and roots boiled without salt, or roasted in the ashes. That’s my prescription for you, sir!”

“Well, well,” said the syndic, “I would willingly exchange my life for yours. You have no expenses; you pay no taxes—do you think that a small thing? Now, I have to spend the very soul out of my body; a little for the cat and a little for the dog, and what remains for me? At the end of the year—so much received, so much spent, everything paid, and nothing over!”

“I should just like to take you by the neck and hold you down to our life for a month or so, so that you could try it!”

“Is that the way to speak to me?” said the syndic, somewhat offended. “You ought to be more respectful.”

“Oh! you must not think, my dear sir,” said the archdeacon, “that the blind man is really wanting in respect towards the authorities. Not at all! He may be a little quick-tempered now and then, but when he recollects himself he is a perfect lamb!”

“A kind of lamb which——” began the Franciscan.

“What do you expect?” interrupted Phœbus. “I used to be as sweet as sugar; but now I am a little spoilt with doing nothing. Now that I have tried it I find, in truth, that the labour of a porter is better than the idleness of a gentleman. Just set me to work in your factory, sir; let me turn the wheel, and give me thirty centimes a day, and you’ll see how the blind man works!”

“Oh! indeed; you and your blarney!” retorted the syndic. “Look here, I would willingly help you, but I cannot. I shall have to shut up the works soon, to turn off every one, even my cook. Are they making game of us with these taxes? I don’t know how we can go on; I haven’t ten shillings left in the world. It is not my place as syndic to say so, but the fault certainly lies with the Government....”

“Heigho!” said the blind man, “we shall be disappointed indeed, if we are putting our trust in you, Mr. Government!”

“You should put your trust in Providence, young man,” said the preaching friar, “and come and hear my sermons!”

“Indeed and he shall come to the sermons, and be hanged to him!” exclaimed the archdeacon. “I’ll give him a couple of eggs for every sermon; at Easter, so many sermons and so many eggs. But if you miss one sermon, you blind rascal, you shall get nothing at all!”

“Put it in writing, sir!”

“Why, you blind scoundrel, are you afraid of my dying first?”

“You, sir?—why, you’ll live to the age of Noah on the clerical soups that Modesta makes for you! No; it’s I that may die before Easter, and I should like to bequeath that little legacy of eggs to my family!”

“Come, come, Modesta! never mind the blind man; it’s time to clear the table. Don’t sit there keeping the brazier warm.”

“Sakes alive!” exclaimed Modesta, looking into the dish; “there were sixty, and there are only eleven left!”

“I’m very sorry I didn’t eat them too!” replied Phœbus, “but I’ll come to breakfast after the sermon to-morrow and finish them!”

“Yes, come by all means; they’ll just do for you!” said the archdeacon, giving a glance at the dish.

“Are they made of meat or potatoes?” asked the Franciscan, with another great pinch of snuff.

“Of meat, of meat,” said Modesta testily.

“Yes, there’s just enough meat to swear by!” said Phœbus.

“Even though there were but a piece the size of a pin’s head,” said the friar as he took another pinch, “that would be enough! To-morrow, you know, archdeacon, it’s a black vigil.”

“The friar is right! Do you want to go to hell for eating polpette to-morrow! Persicomele! there’ll be no more polpette now till next year,—so good-bye, my fine fellow! Modesta, light the syndic to the door. Don’t you see that he has put on his cloak, and wants to go? Good-night, sir!”

“Good-night, archdeacon!” said the syndic, and then turned to whisper in his ear, “By-the-bye, the chaplain always stands up for all bad characters ... and his niece....”

“Why, whatever has the chaplain done to you? Modesta, light these other people out!”

“Never mind me, I can see in the dark!” replied Phœbus, going towards the door. “Modestina, dear, don’t you bother yourself with the light; you’re using up too much oil; you should be saving with it, Modestina!”

“What are you thinking of, poor blind man?—such a trifle as that!” cried Modesta. “Good gracious! we’re all of us baptised Christians, and a little light costs nothing.”

The blind man, in going out, closed the door with such a tremendous bang that he put out Modesta’s lamp; and returning to his disconsolate hut, wished two or three apoplexies to that meddling vagabond of a friar who had deprived him of those poor clothes and the remains of the supper, with which it was the archdeacon’s annual custom to reward the four poor wretches for their labours in the belfry. Having reached his house, he told his wife the good tidings of the eggs at Easter, and fell asleep in the time it takes to tell it. But that night he saw in his dreams neither flowers, nor cities, nor seas bright in the sunshine. He dreamed instead that he was the stout director of the manganese mines, and that he was sitting in a nicely-warmed room at a well-spread table, and just tasting the full flavour of a fat roast fowl. He was just at work on one of the legs when his wife began to turn him over and call him to get up. He struggled with his hands, feeling the director of the mines gradually disappear, and a moment later he became aware that he was only blind Phœbus. Then he hit himself a great thump on the head, and started up because he heard the bells ringing for sermon. When he had got into church he sat down close to the sacristy door, so that the archdeacon might be sure to see him. The preacher seemed to be flinging squalls of rain and wind, and all the devils of hell down from the pulpit on all the crowded, uncovered heads. Phœbus paid no attention to him. When he came out, certain good-for-nothing youngsters, loafing outside, shouted after him—

“Phœbus! Phœbus! what has the preacher been saying?”

“I don’t know!” he replied. “I was thinking of the eggs!”

“By Bacchus! the archdeacon is quite right in thinking him a little cracked! But I do believe that he would be a true believer if he saw the Divine Master’s teachings practised a little better, and also a little to his advantage!”

This was what the chaplain said to himself as he came out from the service, with displeasure still written on his face, and also a certain timid disgust, whether provoked by living men or by the dead, whom he was constantly obliged to see, I do not know.

Mario Pratesi.

OUR SCHOOL AND SCHOOLMISTRESS.

We used to go to school, Sofia and I, with a certain Signora Romola. They were very lavish with Greek and Roman names in our village in those days. Teofilo, Pompeo, Lucrezia, Collatino, Quintilia, were appellations frequently bestowed in baptism. Signora Romola was a strongly-built woman, plump and ruddy of face, and with a soft voice, too soft indeed for the air of severity which she wished to assume. It was her aim to strike awe into us with a glance. In fact we scarcely dared to breathe in her presence, by reason of that terrible glance which slowly swept the class, and she always used to say that it was quite sufficient. “I make them tremble with a glance,” she often told people; and as soon as she made her majestic entrance into school there was immediate silence, a fact of which she was very proud. They used to say she had been a beauty in her youth; I would not be persuaded of the truth of this statement. Her husband was Signor Capponio the chemist, who formed a complete contrast to her. He was a long, thin, thread-paper of a man, with a pair of great spectacles on his big nose, and sharp chin and cheek-bones which seemed to make a triangle in his honest face. He always wore a buffalo-skin cap, with a peak curved like a bird’s beak. I always imagined that he must have come into the world in that cap; I never saw him without it. He could play the flute, and often performed a tune for us boys during our play-hour, stamping vivaciously with one foot, and accompanying with his head, no less vivaciously, the motion of his fingers on the keys. We stood around him with our noses in the air, as though we had been gazing up at the top of a church tower, and held out our arms trying to seize the instrument, whose construction we were eager to examine; but, refusing to let go, he played on as vigorously as before—or even more so—and at last made his escape, saying, “You’ll spoil it! you’ll spoil it!” He had the name of a learned man; and he must, by what I have heard, have understood something of botany; but I think his reputation was really founded on certain sentences from Hippocrates and Galen, in Latin, written up in gilt letters over the shelves in his ancient shop. The gilding of the letters had turned black by reason of the flies which swarmed there, on which, in the summer, Capponio used to wage war—standing in the middle of his shop—by means of a stick with long strips of paper attached to it. I do not remember one of his many proverbs. He must have had a large stock of them, for it was often said, “As Capponio says, with his proverb! Eh!—honest man—he knows a lot about the world!” I used to think that the proverb was a person very much like Capponio himself—buffalo-skin cap and all—but still taller and more serious—appearing now here, now there—always unexpected, and at other times invisible.

Capponio was a great institution among us. Whenever we saw him we rushed up to him, dragging him by the skirts of his long, double-breasted, snuff-coloured coat. And then he would lift us up to let us see Lucca,[^[27]] or show us how to turn somersaults. If, passing through the school-room, he saw one of us on his knees, with the fool’s cap on his head, or his eyes blindfolded, he would try to make fun of his wife’s austerities. She would sometimes inflict punishments even more humiliating than these—for instance, that most terrible one of all, of having to make crosses on the ground with one’s tongue.

“Come, come no sorrow—

If you’re not cured to-day, it will cure you to-morrow!”

Capponio used to say, in a nasal tone, to make the children cease crying and begin to laugh instead, which, in fact, they did; and Sora Romola, who claimed an infallible knowledge of “how to bring up young people,” grew uneasy and said that Capponio was getting us into very bad ways. But we were fonder of Capponio than ever, especially as he was always giving us something—a bunch of grapes, an orange, a pomegranate, or sticks of barley-sugar made by himself. I was particularly fond of these last. In fact, I once succeeded in perpetrating a crime which weighed heavily on my mind. One day I was not allowed to go home at twelve, but kept in to learn my lessons alone, in school. Tired of catching flies, I went down very softly into the shop while Capponio was at dinner. There was no one there but a big cat comfortably asleep on the counter, near the scales. I felt certain that the cat would not report my theft to any one, and very quickly, with my heart beating in a way that is not to be described, I filled my pockets with the delicious transparent morsels, and ate at least half a jar full, being determined, for once in my life, to have really as many as I wanted. But Capponio found it out; and, laying the blame on Camillo, the shop boy, ran after him and seized him by the ear, crying, “Ah! you greedy rascal! I’ve caught you!” When I saw the innocent accused I could hold out no longer, and, coming forward, I blurted out, “It was I!” ... I remembered standing there, very red, with my eyes on the ground, and expecting a sound box on the ear. But Capponio only said, “Will you promise me not to do it again?” “Yes, sir.” “Mind you don’t, then. This time I will forgive you, because you have told the truth; but if you ever do it again I shall tell Sora Romola, and then woe be to you!”

Mario Pratesi.

LOCAL JEALOUSIES.

Men, as well as women, speak ill of their neighbours; there is no denying that fact. But they can never do it as efficiently, and, in any case, they do not do it for the same reason. Men nearly always speak ill of others because they believe themselves greatly superior to those others; and if there is a race in the world, every individual of which believes that the phrase which calls man the lord of creation was made for his own personal use, that race is the Tuscan. Yesterday evening I was listening attentively to a dialogue between a Livornese and a Florentine seated at a table in the Giardino Meyeri. The conversation turned on the English nation.

“The English,” said the Livornese, “are a selfish, heartless nation, who, if the world were on fire, would think that Providence had done it on purpose that they might heat the boilers of their steam-engines without expense!” “That is true,” replied the other; “the French——” “Worse than ever!” interrupted the first; “a nation of barbers, of Robert Macaires, who took Nice and Savoy out of our pockets—yes, sir, out of our pockets, as a pickpocket does a handkerchief. The Spaniards—boastful, proud, vain, ignorant, bigoted, talkers. Come! speaking quite honestly, the Italians are the first people in the world, after all! It’s true that the Piedmontese are a little hard, the Genoese too keen after money, the Neapolitans superstitious, the Sicilians ferocious, and that the proverb says: ‘Beware of a red-haired Venetian, a black-haired Lombard, and any kind of a Romagnole!’ Every one must agree that Tuscany is the garden of Italy, as Italy is the garden of the world, and that the Tuscans, speaking without conceit, are the pearls of mankind!”

“The home of civilisation is in Tuscany,” he went on. “I have heard that said since my childhood, and always by Tuscans, who surely ought to know! Not that I would not admit that the Pistojans are all voice and pen, that the Aretines are excessively devout, not to say hypocrites, that the Siennese are vain, and the Pisans—why, Dante called them ‘the scorn of nations,’ and the Florentines—well! excuse me, a little given to loud talking and short of action ... but the Livornese—ah! the Livornese are really the flower of the Tuscans!... And you may say what you please, but the finest street in Livorno is Via Vittorio Emmanuele, where I live.... I don’t know how any one can stay at Livorno and not have a house in that street.... It is good living there—at least, that is to say, on the left-hand side, because the sun never shines on the right, the houses are damp, and any one who takes one on that side is certainly an idiot. But on the left one can live like a prince; and among all the houses on that side there is not one like mine. I do not say that the other tenants are very first-rate people—oh dear no!... On the fourth floor there is an idiot, whose wife—well, never mind! on the third, a nobleman, with plenty of pride, but no money; on the second, a family all show and pretension, who spend their money right and left in order to look more than they really are, and who will assuredly come to ruin. On the ground floor there is a wretch—a turncoat, a crawling insect who has made money—no more of him! On the first floor I live with my family. My home, I may say, is a real paradise.... My father is dead—he was a gentleman!—a little hot-tempered if you like, a little obstinate; but no human being is without faults!... There is my mother, who is old—well, one knows, inclined to be querulous and tiresome; and my sister, who would be the best girl in Livorno if it were not for a touch of ambition, and a slight tendency to flirting; and then ... there is myself. There! it is not for me to say—but you know me. I am quiet, peaceable, well educated; I am sincere; I know how to keep within my means; I am—well, in short, I am what I am!”

He might as well have said at once—“I am the lord of creation!”

P. C. Ferrigni (“Yorick”).

SUNSHINE.

I don’t say that the sun and I are great friends. I have too much respect for my courteous readers (including those who get their reading for nothing, by borrowing this book instead of buying it) to permit myself the slightest and most harmless of falsehoods where they are concerned. I am not a friend of the sun’s, because I do not esteem him. That way he has of shining indiscriminately on all,—of working in partnership with everybody, from the photographer who forges bank-notes, to the laundress and the plasterer, seems to me to show a lamentable want of dignity in the Prime Minister of Nature. Besides, I remember that, many years ago, he was kept under arrest for twelve hours by a gendarme of antiquity, Captain Joshua, who must have had his reasons for taking so momentous a step.

Perhaps he was set at liberty again, because no grounds could be discovered for taking proceedings; but, at the same time, entirely respectable people do not, as a rule, get arrested for nothing!

However, the sun and I live so very far apart from one another, that I cannot say I see the necessity of breaking with him altogether. Every year, about the middle of spring, I take a run down to the Ardenza, stop on the sea-shore, pass respectfully in front of the villas and palaces of the neighbourhood, and return home with an easy conscience, and the feeling of having left my card at summer’s door. So that, later in the season, when I meet the July sun, a sun which is quite Livornese, a municipal sun (the Corporation are extremely proud of it), we greet each other like old acquaintances!...

The July sun is a great benefactor to the Livornese. If gratitude were still the fashion, he ought to be made syndic of the city, and his painted image ought to figure on the municipal shield, instead of the present device of the two-towered fortress in the midst of the sea.

P. C. Ferrigni.

WHEN IT RAINS.

Suppose for a moment—and note, that when a man says suppose, he is perfectly sure of his ground, and woe be to any who contradicts him—suppose, then, for one moment, that man is really a rational animal.

The bizarre originality of being rational, which constitutes the last term of the definition, does not prejudice the wisely general character of the first term, which is this: Man is an animal.

Now, I ask, what use is reason to a man, if it does not make him take an umbrella when it rains? It is all very well for you to think yourself superior to all other created beasts,—to be proud of your learning, your science, your experience, your laws, your noble blood, or your ample income;—if you find yourself out in the rain without an umbrella, you will always be the most contemptible figure in creation.

Let us be just;—humanity is not lovely when seen through the falling drops of rain, by the cold, dull light of a sunless day, under a dull, leaden, low, foggy sky, resting like a cover on the circle of the horizon. All men wear faces of portentous length; one can see that they bear an undying grudge against meteorologic science, on account of that phenomenon of aqueous infiltration which is so deadly to new hats and old boots. They go their ways dripping along the rows of houses, under the deluges from the water-pipes, picking their way between the puddles, with countenances cloudier than the skies, muttering the devil’s litanies between their teeth with a muffled murmur like the gurgling of a boiling saucepan. At every corner, such accidents as making too close an acquaintance with the ribs of an umbrella coming the other way, getting splashed with liquid mud by a passing horse, or spoiling the freshness of a new pair of trousers by means of an overflowing gutter, provoke a glance which, if looks could kill, would be downright murder,—a contraction of the facial muscles which recalls the grin of the ancestral ape in a bad temper, and an explosion of sotto voce ejaculations, expressing a pious desire to see one’s neighbours in general attached to the muzzle of a breech-loading mitrailleuse in full activity.

... Now, to orthodox minds there cannot be the slightest doubt on the subject; rain is by no means a fitting and necessary part of the order of things; it is rather of the nature of a judgment. The Scriptures make no mention of bad weather before the time of the Flood. Rain-water was in nowise needed for the development of germs or the ripening of the harvest. Adam had been condemned to water the earth with the sweat of his brow, and this irrigation would have been quite sufficient to raise maize and beans over the whole surface of the globe....

From the preceding considerations it seems to me that one can draw two principal conclusions:—

1. That rain is not a necessity of Nature, but rather what is commonly called a judgment of Providence.

2. That human beings, when it rains, are exceedingly ugly.

Take these two conclusions and put them aside; for we may draw from them later on the most curious and unexpected consequences....

P. C. Ferrigni.

THE PATENT ADAPTABLE SONNET.
FROM “IL SIGNOR LORENZO.”

... Gianni. I have three systems of making money; one is that of the poet. Suppose, for example, there is a wedding, a young man who has just taken his degree, a dancer who has been a great success, a celebrated preacher, a new member of the Chamber of Deputies,—I have a sonnet which will do for any of them; it only wants the last three lines varied to suit the occasion. I have six alternative versions of those three lines. It is a revolver-sonnet; you can fire six shots with it. Do you see? The two quartets consist of philosophical observations on the joys and sorrows of life; they will do for every one. In the first tercet I descend from the general to the particular. “O thou!” I say without further appellation. That thou has neither sex nor age; it is equally suitable for man or woman, old or young, noble or bourgeois. (Begins to recite, gesticulating.)

And thou, into whose heart high Heaven all pure

Virtues did gather, and a noble need

Did grant of soothing woes that men endure.

You see that is adapted to all, and the point of the whole is the idea of soothing the woes that men endure. Now the last tercet is, so to speak, the loaded cartridge in the revolver. Suppose I am addressing a bride—

Enjoy, O fair and gentle Bride, the crown

Due to all generous souls elect indeed;

May Heaven to-day send thee this guerdon down.

Or else, for a graduate—

Enjoy, O gentle scholar, thou the crown

Due to all generous souls elect indeed;

May Science send to-day this guerdon down!

Or, “Enjoy, O gentle artist;” or, again, “Enjoy, O offspring of a royal race;” or, “O, industrious plebeian;” “O sacred order”—according to circumstances.

Gertrude. And supposing there were a death in the family?

Gianni. Ah! certainly! There I should say, “Enjoy, O gentle heir!”

Gertrude. It is an ingenious idea.

Paolo Ferrari.

LOVE BY PROXY.

Petronio.... I tell you I’m tired of it! And it is you I complain of—you and your apathy, which poor Virginia thinks she can cure by means of the stimulus of jealousy! And I am to act the part of stimulus! But it is a part I don’t at all relish, because when you come to look into it, the stimulus, instead of acting on you, acts on me! In other words, I am falling in love—do you understand that? I am falling in love with your Virginia, my Carlo! I am becoming your rival, my good friend!—and a neglected rival, by all that’s contemptible! Because I am your friend I speak of nothing but you when I am with her;—she accuses, and I defend you—you idiot! She doubts you, and I keep on swearing that you adore her—blind fool!... And all this is very dangerous to my virtue. For, while it is quite true that I speak on your account, I feel my ears burning on my own. It is true that Virginia is touched by my words, because I, lying most vilely, keep telling her that they are yours. But I know well enough that they are my own words; therefore, is the look that flashes from those great eyes of hers, as she listens to them, mine or yours? I can’t tell, and the effort to find out causes such a confusion of emotions—mine, thine, his, ours, yours, everybody’s...—that my head spins round faster than Angiolina’s reel. There, you have it now!

P. Ferrari.

A WET NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY.

LUISA, and LAURETTA, her maid, packing up trunks.

Lauretta. Here—this trunk is locked, and now we are all ready.

Luisa. Oh! I hear my husband’s voice.

Giuliano (behind the scenes). Yes, yes—don’t worry yourselves; I will be punctual.

A Voice (ditto). Yes—and your wife too; don’t forget!

Other Voices. Yes, of course, your wife must come with you.

Giu. Yes, yes. Then it is understood——Good-bye for the present. (Enter Giuliano.) Good evening, dear. (Lays aside his gun.) Here I am, back again. (Looking round.) Oh! good—the trunks are all ready, and the smaller boxes have followed their laudable example!... Everything is in order!... Law and order for ever!

Luisa. And you’re as mad as ever! Are you tired?

Giu. According to your own rule—which holds good under any circumstances—I never get tired. And to prove it to you—there is to be dancing this evening.

Luisa and Lauretta (astonished). Dancing this evening!

Giu. Dancing.

Luisa. But you don’t think——?

Giu. I never think—another general rule. Yes, I repeat, there is to be dancing, and, what is better, you will dance too.

Luisa. I, indeed!

Giu. Oh, yes! you shall dance, dear;—you shall come with your husband to the party we have got up on the spur of the moment—you will be lovely—adorable! Oh! don’t say no—I beg you—I entreat you. As a friend, I entreat you ... (Unbuttoning his coat.) As a husband, I command you.

Luisa (laughing as if in spite of herself). You are a queer creature!

Giu. Ah! you laugh?

Luisa. I may laugh; but you must not think I am going to give way.

Giu. Then there is nothing for it but a story? the resource of old-fashioned comedies. Well, listen now, and you shall have your story.... This is how it happened. Coming back from shooting, as we drew near the village, we began to debate how we might spend the remaining hours of this evening, up to the time of our departure, most agreeably. We stopped in a meadow to form a club and discuss matters. As usually happens in clubs, much learned nonsense was talked and many absurd measures proposed.... At last some one suggested getting up an extempore dance. The motion was negatived by the mayor and his secretary, whose figures are obviously incompatible with any kind of gymnastic exercise—except perhaps that to be obtained on a see-saw. It was then that I carried my coup d’état; we were all seated, look you, so I took in the situation at a glance, and exclaimed, “The motion is put to the vote. Those against it will kindly rise; those in favour of it will remain seated.” Our two Falstaffs exchanged a look full of anguish, and seeing that they could not record a negative vote without the frightful exertion of rising from the ground, preferred to affirm by remaining as they were. The resolution was therefore passed by acclamation, and the dance is to begin immediately in the drawing-room of the Manfredi Palace, not far from this house.

Luisa. And what results from all this? That we are going to this dance?—we, who have to start at daybreak! Do think of it, Giuliano—the thing is impossible!

Giu. How impossible?

Luisa. Don’t you see? all my dresses are already packed in this trunk; the tulle, the ribbons, and flowers in that box; the gold ornaments locked up in my jewel-case.... I should have to open everything, turn everything upside down; and the coachman may come any moment to fetch the things.... No, no—it’s absolutely impossible!

Giu. Hm!—well, if there’s no help for it—if it is to cause so much inconvenience.... Well—sometimes it is as well to be reasonable....

Luisa. Come now, that’s right.

Giu. Well—I’ll make this sacrifice.

Luisa. Yes, for my sake, well done!

Giu. Yes, for your sake, I’ll try to put up with it.... I’ll go alone.

Lau. (aside, laughing). Oh! I didn’t expect that.

Luisa (astonished). What! you’re going?

Giu. Oh! certainly!

Luisa. But, my gracious! your clothes are all packed up!

Giu. They can be unpacked, I suppose.

Luisa. But the trunks are locked.

Giu. They can be opened.

Luisa. But do you, or don’t you, understand that the cabman may call for them any moment?

Giu. Send him to the devil! I’ll take that much on myself.

Luisa. Oh! I tell you what, this is mere childishness, and I am not going to be the victim of all your whims and fancies! Now that I’ve nearly killed myself getting things straight, packing and getting ready and all, ... and I’m to upset everything again. I tell you I just won’t do it! I don’t feel fit for it, and I tell you I’m not going to open a single trunk,—so there! (Walks up and down.)

Giu. You’re not going to undo anything?

Luisa. I’m not.

Giu. Quite sure?

Luisa. Absolutely.

Giu. Then I will. (Opens a trunk.)

Lau. (aside). It’s all up now!

Luisa (quickly). Don’t—don’t! you’re turning everything upside down.

Giu. Either you or I.

Luisa. Do make an end of it!... There!—there’s no help for it—what can one do with a lunatic? Get out of the way, do! What is it you want?

Giu. Not much—shirt, socks, white waistcoat, black necktie, dress coat, gloves, crush-hat, handkerchief, breastpin, Eau-de-Cologne—nothing else!

Luisa. Mercy on us! Oh! poor me!

Giu. Ah! and my boots.

Luisa. Anything else? Lauretta, where are the boots? Do come and help me here!

Lau. They’re in the green trunk in the other room!

Giu. Francesco! (Enter Francesco.) Go into the other room at once, and look if there is a pair of patent leather boots in the green trunk. (Exit Francesco.) Ah! by Jove! I knew I had forgotten something!

Luisa. Oh! good gracious! what else?

Giu. Why, of course, my other pair of trousers.

Luisa. Why, they’re right at the bottom of the box.

Giu. Oh, indeed! You don’t expect me to go in these, do you? (Enter Francesco without the boots.) Well—about those boots?

Fran. They are there.

Giu. Well, what have you done with them?

Fran. They’re in the green trunk.

Giu. Haven’t you brought them?

Fran. You told me to look if they were there, sir; you didn’t say I was to bring them.

Giu. I must say you’re wonderfully intelligent for your age. (With ironical amiability.) Go back again, my dearest boy, open the trunk, take out that pair of varnished boots.... Do you know, by-the-bye, what varnished means? It means that they have never been blacked by you.... A new pair that has not been worn yet.... Take them in your hands, and bring them here to me.

Fran. Am I to bring in the trunk as well, sir?

Giu. Tell me now, what did your mother say when she saw you were such an idiot?

Fran. She said nothing, sir; she cried.

Giu. Very good! Well, you can leave the trunk in the other room. (Walking up and down, while Luisa and Lauretta are unpacking, and talking as if to himself.) Oh! I’m not at all sorry to go out by myself for once in a way.... After two years of marriage....

Lau. (aside to Luisa). Mistress, if I were you, I wouldn’t let him go by himself.

Luisa. Oh! he’s only joking ... My dear girl, if I had not to turn so many things out....

Giu. Let me see ... to whom should I devote my attention more particularly?... Decidedly there is no one but the doctor’s wife....

Luisa (aside to Lauretta). Where did you put my light blue gauze dress?

Lau. (aside). In the other trunk, on the top.

Giu. (as before). Yes, yes; that’s it ... the doctor’s wife.... After the dance I will see her home.

Luisa (aside to Lauretta). Just open the other trunk and take out my blue dress. (Aloud, to Giuliano.) Just listen, Giuliano, I have been thinking it over, and ... I think I’ll come too.

Giu. But just think, dear; you’ll have to turn everything upside down and undo all the boxes you have packed.

Luisa. Never mind.

Giu. Then, you see, you have your dresses in this trunk, your tulle and flowers and lace in that box, your jewellery——

Luisa. Do stop, you wretch! You want to have your revenge on me; but it won’t do. I tell you I don’t mind; I’ll turn out everything and come ... that is, if you want me!

Giu. Want you? How can you doubt it? But you’ll have to be quick.

Luisa (running to Lauretta). Oh! I’ll be ready directly, never fear. Quick, Lauretta; just throw the things anywhere; never mind where, as long as you can get at my dress.

Giu. Let us be clear about things, dear wife. Directly is a relative term, and when it relates to a lady’s toilet it is difficult to find a fixed standard by which one can judge. Well then—(watch in hand)—how much time will you require?

Luisa. Oh! just think of it! A quarter of an hour—half-an-hour at most.... I’m sure I shall not take three-quarters ... or at any rate only a very little more.

Giu. Ah! ah! you’re just like Goldoni’s lawyer. Well, try to make an effort, at any rate!

Luisa. Oh! don’t be afraid; I won’t be a minute.

Giu. I tell you what I’ll do: while you’re dressing I’m going to throw myself on the bed to rest a little.... So when you are ready, just tell me.... I shall not be a minute dressing. (Exit, but goes on speaking behind the scenes.) Mind, I want you to look your best. What dress are you going to put on?

Luisa. The blue gauze.

Giu. All right.

Fran. (returning with the boots). Where’s the master?

Lau. In the bedroom. (Exit Francesco.)

Fran. (behind the scenes). Sir!

Giu. (in a sleepy voice). Let me alone.

Fran. The boots are here, sir.

Giu. Go away with you.

Fran. But you told me ... (Comes out on the stage, followed by a pillow thrown by Giuliano. Mutters to himself:) After all, the proverb is right, “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

Luisa. Really, in this house we are not likely to die of melancholy. Come, Lauretta, and help me to get my dress on.

(Exeunt Luisa and Lauretta.)

Fran. As I’ve nothing to do, I might as well go to my room and sleep a little. By Jove! I think it’s raining. (Goes to look out of window.) Yes, indeed, that’s good! I wonder how the mistress will manage to go to that dance.

Luisa (within). Francesco!

Fran. Yes, ma’am.

Luisa. Is it raining?

Fran. I’m afraid so.... If you’ll allow me, ma’am, I’ll go away to my room; you can give a call whenever you want me.

Luisa. Yes, yes, you may go. (Exit Francesco.)

(Enter Cavallotto.)

Cav. What’s this? Everything was ready, and now ... Body o’ the morning! what does all this mean?

Luisa (within, Lauretta). My good man, we are going to a dance.

Cav. And when will you start?

Luisa. We shall start later.

Cav. But that does not suit me at all, ma’am! Do you know that we have forty miles to go? And I don’t want to find myself on the road after dark.

Giuliano (within, awaking). What’s the matter there?

Luisa. Oh! that will be all right. Giuliano, would you mind speaking to Cavallotto?

Giu. (as before). Ah! Cavallotto, is it you? What do you want? We’ll start later....

Cav. But, I repeat, by all the——

Giu. (half asleep). Don’t bother me now.... I’ll pay you extra.... We’ll make two days’ journey of it.... Anything you like, as long as you go away now.

Cav. Ah! if you’re willing to stop half-way, I have no more to say; on the contrary, I am glad of it, because one of my horses has a pain——

Giu. Ah! you scoundrel! (Exit Cavallotto, shrugging his shoulders.) And if we wanted to leave at six, how would you get out of the difficulty?... Answer!... Ah! you are dumb! Let us see now ... how ... because we shall have to ... Yes, certainly! (Falls asleep.)

(Enter Luisa, in evening dress, arranging her ornaments.)

Luisa. My good Cavallotto——! Why! he’s gone. So much the better. Now I must call Giuliano, and find out what he means to do if it rains.

Lau. After all, it is only a few steps to the Manfredi Palace.

Luisa. That is true; but at any rate it is time to call him, Giuliano!

Giu. (within). What is it?

Luisa. It’s time to get up.

Giu. What a bother! I was sleeping so comfortably.

Luisa. Come, be quick!

Giu. Tell me, Luisa, have you really set your heart on going to this tiresome dance?

Luisa. Oh, indeed! if you’re not enough to provoke a saint!

Giu. Calm yourself, my dear; I’m coming. (Enters in his dressing-gown. He sits down near the front of the stage.) See here; while I was in there on the bed, my dear girl, I was reflecting seriously——

Luisa. Do tell the truth, and say you were sleeping deliciously!

Giu. That may be, but even in sleep the mind continues its intellectual processes, and, as I said, I thought over your judicious observations....

Luisa (vexed). Really, this is too much! First you nearly drive me out of my senses, till I made up my mind to come with you to the dance; then, when I have turned out all my boxes, and taken the trouble to dress, and am all but ready, you want ... Will you be kind enough not to carry the joke too far?

Giu. Enough! let us perform this heroic action! Francesco!

Fran. (within). Sir?

Giu. Come here directly. (Enter Francesco.) Take my things and come and help me to dress. (Exit into his bedroom, followed by Francesco.)

Luisa. Oh! these men! these men! all tyrants and bullies—even the best of them! Come! where are my bracelets?

Lau. This time it went off all right, though!

Luisa. Oh! it’s not ended yet.... If you only knew ... I am terribly afraid.

Lau. What about?

Luisa. I am afraid I have given Giuliano the wrong pair of trousers ... those that did not fit, and made him so angry....

Lau. Those that he threw at the tailor’s head after the first time of trying them on?

Luisa. Yes, those....

Giu. (from within). Luisa!

Luisa (aside to Lauretta). Ah! didn’t I say so? (Aloud.) What is it?

Giu. Which trousers have you given me?

Luisa. I ... I don’t know....

Giu. They are those that ass of a tailor made.... I kept them out of charity, but I never meant to wear them ... never!

Luisa. Oh! they can’t be those.

(Enter Giuliano from the bedroom.)

Giu. Can’t they? I tell you it is the very pair.

Luisa. But do be persuaded....

Giu. Persuaded, indeed! Why, of course they are the same; and if you don’t give me another pair I shall not come.

Luisa. And I tell you that I don’t feel the least bit inclined to pull all the things out of another trunk.... It’s nothing but excuses to make me stay at home. But anyway——

Giu. Oh, heavens! another sermon! No, no—do be quiet. I’ll resign myself, and try to endure.... Francesco, my boots! (He puts them on at the back of the stage, turning his back on the audience.) Gracious, how tight they are!... curses on that shoemaker! How am I to hold out with my feet in these? (Rises and walks about stiffly and clumsily.)

Luisa. Another excuse!

Giu. Excuse! I tell you it feels as though I had my feet in a vice. I can’t move.

Luisa. After all, you’re not going to play at tennis.

Giu. Well, and what then? If a gentleman does not feel disposed to take part in the noble game of tennis, is he to be laced up so that he cannot move?

Luisa (angrily). In short—I understand! Do you wish to stay at home? Does it bore you to come to the dance? Do you want to go to bed? We will stay at home—we will not go to the dance—we will go to bed!

Giu. Mind that I do not take you at your word.

Luisa. Much it matters to me if you do! Come, Lauretta, help me off with these things!

Giu. Francesco, get these boots off for me! (Exit.)

(Luisa sits down R., with signs of vexation, and Lauretta begins to undo her head-dress.)

Fran. (following Giuliano). I am really beginning to get tired of this business.

Luisa (rises and walks to the door of Giuliano’s room, Lauretta following her and taking off her ornaments as she goes). I tell you all the same, sir, that this is not the way to treat me; and if you play me this sort of trick again, I know very well what I shall do. (Returns to the front of the stage, and sits down, still followed by Lauretta.)

(Enter Giuliano, followed by Francesco.)

Giu. And what, if you please, do you want to do? This is very fine indeed! Is it my fault if my clothes and boots are too tight? Am I to be condemned to walk about like a wooden doll—like an elephant—for a whole night, to please you? Your pretensions are truly wonderful! (Exit.)

Marco (behind the scenes). Is Giuliano here? May I come in?

Luisa. Come in.

(Enter Marco, with an umbrella, in a black dress-coat.)

Marco. Madam——

(Enter Giuliano, in dressing-gown and slippers.)

Giu. Marco, my dear fellow, are you looking for me?

Marco. Precisely.

Luisa. With your permission.... (Exit, with Lauretta.)

Marco. Well done! you are just dressing.

Giu. Just so—we were just dressing. What’s the news?

Mar. The news is, that it is raining, and in this weather none of the ladies will be coming to our improvised party. We therefore thought of sending a carriage for them.

Giu. Well?

Mar. It’s not so well. A carriage is not so easily found in our village.

Giu. I understand. If it were a cart, now....

Mar. We found one, however; a fine, commodious coach, to hold six people——

Giu. An ark, in short—just the thing for this threatened universal deluge. Well, what then?

Mar. The worst is, we cannot get——

Giu. The horses?

Mar. Precisely. The owner sold them last week, to buy——

Giu. Hay?

Mar. No, to buy a yoke of oxen.

Giu. Well, why don’t you harness the oxen?

Mar. Just like you—you must have your joke. Listen, now—this is what we thought of doing. There are two cab-drivers in the place; we have made arrangements with them to fetch the ladies in their cabs.

Giu. Very good.

Mar. So I have come to give you notice that in a little while they will be coming round for your wife and you—so try to be ready.

Giu. But really....

Mar. Oh! there is no “really” that will hold. If you don’t come in the cab, we’ll come to fetch you with a stick.

Giu. No—not that. Bruises for bruises, I prefer those of the cab. I’ll come.

Mar. With your wife, mind!

Giu. With my wife.

Mar. Good-bye till then. (Exit.)

Giu. Good-bye.

(Enter Luisa, still in evening dress, followed by Lauretta.)

Giu. So, you understand that you absolutely must go!

Luisa. And be quick about it. (Laughing.)

Giu. Francesco!

Fran. Here I am.

Giu. Quick, I want to dress! (Exit.)

Fran. (aside). Now, I am most decidedly disgusted!

(Exit.)

Giu. (within). Luisa, pity me! I am putting my feet back into the vice!

Luisa. For so sweet a cause one can suffer anything!

Giu. (within). Ah!... May you be bitten by a mad dog!

Luisa. What’s the matter?

Giu. That idiot of a Francesco has just tenderly trodden on my foot with one of his iron-heeled boots.

Fran. (within). I beg your pardon, sir; but would you please reflect that it was you who put your foot under my heel?

Giu. And hurt your heel, eh?

Lau. (laughing). I think, ma’am, the scenes that take place in this house, especially this evening ... I must say it is a pity people can’t see them in the theatre!

(Enter Giuliano in his shirt sleeves, followed by Francesco.)

Giu. Here I am; where’s my necktie? (Francesco hands it to him, and he puts it on. Luisa looks on, laughing.) You laugh, eh?—unhappy woman! You laugh because you cannot take in at a glance the seriousness of your husband’s position!... My waistcoat! (Francesco hands it.) For one has to calculate all chances ... the chance of a declaration, for instance!

Luisa. What business have you making declarations, sir?

Giu. I have no business whatever to make any; but I might do so—go on my knees, and all—and then ... My dress-coat! (Francesco hands it, as before.)... Give me a pin for my necktie. (Luisa brings him one.) Do me the favour to put it in for me, will you? But mind you don’t make a hole in me—see?

Luisa. Now, let the cab come when it likes—we are all ready!

Giu. Yes; the victim is prepared for the sacrifice! Just imagine it! My feet are so numb and dead I might be a Chinese—a remnant of the Russian army—a survivor of the Beresina! And then to have to walk upstairs in these same boots, and finish up by dancing a mazurka with the mayor’s daughter!

(Enter Marco.)

Mar. May I come in?

Giu. Oh! it’s you? Here we are, quite ready!

(Luisa puts on her shawl and hood, helped by Lauretta. Giuliano takes his hat and gloves.)

Mar. I came myself, because——

Giu. Thanks for the trouble, my dear fellow. Come along, Luisa. (Gives her his arm.)

Mar. But—one moment!

Luisa. What is it?

Mar. I am truly grieved.... But I must....

Giu. But what is it all about?

Mar. One of the two cabmen we were counting on is away, ... and the other....

Luisa. That is our Cavallotto; he is here, surely?

Mar. But one of his horses is ill, and cannot be harnessed. The rain continues to come down in torrents; and as we saw there was no help for it, we determined to give up the idea of the dance, and have one instead when you come again.

Luisa. The dance, then....

Giu. There is none?

Mar. There is none. I came to make my apologies to you, madam; and now I must run off home to change my clothes, for I am as wet as a drowned chicken. Madam—Giuliano, old fellow, I wish you good-night and a pleasant journey. (Exit.)

(Giuliano and Luisa stand, arm in arm, looking at one another comically.)

Lauretta (aside to Francesco). Go and tell the cook to bring up supper.

Francesco. A good idea. (Exit.)

Giu. (looking round). A magnificent room, isn’t it?

Luisa (who has laid aside her wraps, imitating him). Splendidly illuminated.

Giu. Ladies in great numbers.

Luisa. Plenty of gentlemen.

Giu. (looking at Luisa). See, see, how gracious my wife is to the mayor!

Luisa (looking at Giuliano). Look at my husband doing the polite to the doctor’s wife!

Giu. Madam, will you kindly favour me with this polka?

Luisa. With all the pleasure in the world, sir.

Giu. (to Lauretta and Francesco, who are standing at the back of the stage laughing). Orchestra!—polka!

(Lauretta sings a polka, Francesco taking the bass. Giuliano and Luisa take a few steps together.)

(Enter the Cook, in white cap and apron.)

Cook. The supper is served.

Giu. Now, shall we go to supper?

(Exeunt.)

(Curtain.)

Paolo Ferrari

A LOST EXPLORER.
FROM THE COMEDY “CORVI” (CARRION CROWS).

Bertrando, the editor of the Demos, and Serpilli, the publisher, have just received word of the death of their friend Arganti, who had gone on an exploring expedition into the Soudan.

Bertrando. I have just sent the confirmation of the sad news. Poor Arganti! This sudden loss has quite paralysed me. It is all very well to make a parade of one’s want of feeling and pretend to be a cynic; but when the thunderbolt falls at your very feet....

Serpilli. Just so; but, I say, what mad notion was it that made him go and get himself killed out there? At fifty, too! Were there not enough hare-brained young fellows eager to discover new outlets, new resources for commerce, for industry, for African humanity, which, by-the-bye, loves us as well as people love the smoke in their eyes?... Wasn’t he quite comfortable here, in this charming house, with the best of wives? No, sir! He must needs be off poking his nose into other people’s affairs!

Ber. You forget how many years he had travelled—and the love of science——

Ser. One might get over it if the misfortune had been confined to the dead, but it also touches the living!

Ber. Serpilli!

Ser. My dear fellow, it’s all very well for you to talk; but I have undertaken a complete illustrated edition of all his travels.... Sixty thousand francs, do you understand? I am ruined!

Ber. Do you think this is the time——?

Ser. Yes, yes, certainly—I mourn for him—I am deeply grieved; but who will give me back my sixty thousand francs? It’s ruin—it’s bankruptcy!... Oh! who would have thought it? And it must happen to me, of all men in the world!

Ber. Come, have done with this! Who prevents your continuing the issue? Surely Arganti’s writings have not lost their value through his death?

Ser. What interest can attach to his expedition to Palestine, undertaken twenty years ago, now that people can make a holiday excursion of it and travel by rail? It needs something else to tickle the palate of the public, who, nowadays, are perfectly familiar with Afghanistan, Zululand, Basutoland,—not to mention journeys to the centre of the earth, to the bottom of the sea, and the sphere of the moon! My poor sixty thousand francs!... If he had lived it would not have been so bad. With a Mutual Admiration Society such as the fashionable papers know how to get up, something might have been done. But now that Arganti is dead, who is going to waste his time in praising him? You will have your time fully taken up in bringing out some new genius—one of those startling and powerful ones who open new horizons to the heart and mind, to science, and their country every quarter of an hour! And I shall be sacrificed!

Ber. You are both ungrateful and mistaken. You have made quite a nice little sum out of our poor friend’s works, which we advertised for you at reduced prices and reviewed in special articles!

Ser. Why, I have spent the whole on advertising the new edition; and now, just as I am about to reap the fruits of judicious puffing, everything is upset by death—the one thing I had not calculated on.

Ber. Serpilli! Serpilli!

Ser. It is enough to bring on an attack of the jaundice! If Arganti had at least confined himself to writing a couple of volumes!... No, sir! Twenty-seven!

Ber. Would you, out of sordid self-interest, wish the scientific and literary heritage of the nation to be diminished?

Ser. You are laughing at me. You are quite right; I have been an idiot.

Ber. I respect every one’s convictions.

---

Serpilli, Bertrando, Geronte (an embalmer). Enter Francesco.

Francesco. The telegraph messenger has just brought these six telegrams.

Ser. Give them to me.

(Francesco gives them, and exits.)

Ser. (opening the telegrams and reading). The Independent Liberal Democratic Association—the syndic—the Association of Watchmakers’ Apprentices—the tribunal—the prefect.... “Unspeakable grief”—“sorrow of the human race”—“words fail.”... (Throws the telegrams on the table.) “In great misfortunes vibrates the heart of great nations.”...

Per. (enters hurriedly). And of all great artists.

Ger. The sculptor Peralti, a dear friend, one of our associates.

Ser. (to Peralti). Have you heard, too?

Per. I have read some twenty or thirty telegrams posted up at the street corners, and have at once hastened here to present to the widow this design for a monument to be erected to her husband.

Ser. Did you have it ready?

Per. An artist never lets himself be taken unawares.

Ger. You have the instinct of genius!

Per. (unrolling a sheet of paper which he holds in his hand, and giving it to Geronte). You see, a large pedestal with three steps—two sleeping lions, in Canova’s manner—a cubic block of granite, which has a philosophic signification. The statue is seated on a curule chair.... Just look at the subtlety, the diapason, the tonality, the depth of the tout ensemble!

Ser. But surely this is the drawing you made for Professor Giulini.

Ger. (handing the paper to Serpilli). I thought I had seen it exhibited as a design for a monument to General Quebrantador.

Ser. (handing it to Peralti). Not at all. I tell you——

Ger. And I maintain——

Per. Calm yourselves, gentlemen. The artist of any élan dashes off his idea just as genius inspires him.... It will then serve its purpose when a purpose is made apparent. (Rolls up the drawing.)

Ger. Bravo! I hold exactly the same theory with regard to my own science. I prepare the acids....

(Enter Francesco.)

Fran. What is all this, Signor Serpilli? Just look, what a bundle of telegrams!

Ser. Excellent! Go and tell Signor Bertrando.

Fran. (lays the telegrams on the table). Oh! by-the-bye, I was forgetting.... What has become of my head?... There is a photographer outside who will insist on seeing the mistress.

Ser. Show him in. (Exit Francesco.)

Per. Only give me 50,000 francs, and Arganti shall have the most characteristic monument of the age!

(Enter Photographer, with his camera.)

Ser. What do you want, sir?

Pho. I saw all the telegrams posted up. Every one was in a state of consternation, asking who Arganti was.... Having made inquiries on the subject, I hastened hither with my camera, and would now request the favour of taking a photograph of the illustrious Arganti’s portrait.... Begging your pardon, what was his Christian name?

Ser. Ettore.

Pho. ... Poor Ettore’s portrait. I will guarantee a work of art that shall be a tremendous success! I am also going to take photographs of his bedroom, his study, his inkstand, the front of the house—everything!—and to advertise them in all the papers.

Ser. (shaking him by the hand). I thank you in the name of the family. To honour the noble dead is not only a work of merit—it is a duty: a duty which we are here to carry out.

Ger. I alone can do nothing.... Ah! Signor Serpilli!

Ser. Since common feelings of delicacy have assembled us in this spot, let us take steps for transferring to the public the conviction of the greatness of our loss. (Rings the bell.)

Pho. Poor Ettore!

Per. Poor, dear fellow!

Ger. My poor friend!

Ser. Well.... (After a pause, rubbing his hands.) We are all mortal.

C. Lotti.

THE SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION.

Pandolfo. It is not to be tolerated! They do it on purpose to drive me out of my senses!

Paolo Galanti. Who has made you angry, Signor Pandolfo?

Pan. Who? Does any one ask? My wife and daughter—— What! whom do I see? You, Benini!

Ben. So you recognised me at once? I thought you had forgotten me altogether.

Pan. No, sir, I had not forgotten you. Am I a man to forget old friends?... For we certainly are old friends.

(They shake hands cordially.)

Ben. We are, indeed! Twenty years——

Pan. No, not twenty years; eighteen or nineteen.... We used to see a great deal of each other—do you remember?

Ben. Don’t I?

Pan. We often used to dispute; because you are of a most contradictory temper.

Ben. I?

Pan. Would you deny it?

Ben. Well, no—I was young and impetuous in those days, and had not much sense—or indeed none at all.

Pan. That is not the case—you were not altogether without sense.... It is true you had your little eccentricities—but, after all....

Ben. And you never paid the slightest attention to my words....

Pan. That is not true! I always attended to you—I always had the greatest consideration for you, I assure you; and it gives me more pleasure than I can express to find you here again.

(They shake hands again.)

Pao. (aside to Benini). My word! I have never yet seen him receive any one so well!

Pan. You must come to see my wife.

Ben. I do not know whether Signora Angelica will be disposed to welcome me after all these years.

Pan. Of course she will! I’ll answer for that! Why—an intimate friend of mine! Yet she does everything she possibly can to contradict and oppose me, that woman!—She has not a bad disposition—I would not say that; but it is a certain perversity of humour. Just imagine that, at this very moment, when all the visitors present in the place are going to assemble in these rooms, she could find no better way of spending her time than in going off for a long walk on the beach. Never lets herself be seen—persists in withdrawing from society—mere madness, I call it!... We have a daughter, and if this sort of thing goes on, how shall we ever get her settled in life?

Pao. Oh! as to that, the young lady cannot fail to find——

Pan. What! are you, too, going to contradict me?

Pao. No, most certainly not! Only, since the ladies are going out, if you will permit me, I should like to accompany them for part of the way.

Pan. Hm!

Pao. I will just go and fetch my hat and umbrella.

Pan. (aside). What a bore he is—always in the way!

Pao. (aside to Benini). Signor Pandolfo appears to have a great regard for you.

Ben. (aside to Paolo). Quite true; there was a time when I could get him to do anything I wanted.

Pao. (as before). Do, like a good fellow, one thing for me,—say a word or two in my favour.

Ben. (ditto). In your favour? All right! It is just what I was thinking of doing.

Pao. (ditto). Thanks!

Ben. (ditto). Oh! you’ve nothing to thank me for.

Pao. (ditto). I shall be back soon. (Exit.)

Ben. (aside). Now I’ll do his business. (To Pandolfo.) I understand why you gave permission to that young man to escort your wife and daughter.

Pan. I never gave him permission. And what did you understand?

Ben. Galanti is an amiable fellow——

Pan. Nothing of the sort!

Ben. Witty.

Pan. Do you see any wit in him?

Ben. Good-looking——

Pan. A dandified fool!

Ben. Courteous——

Pan. Too much so. The fellow agrees with every one.

Ben. He would be a son-in-law quite after your own heart. I would, but——

Pan. Son-in-law, be hanged! If you don’t look out you will make me use language I shall regret!

Ben. Well, don’t get angry.... Every one believes that he is going to marry your daughter.

Pan. Then he may whistle for her. My Elisa’s husband ought to be a young man with brains; and this Galanti of yours is a fool.

Ben. Well, not quite that.

Pan. He is! I want a man of character, and this jackanapes is nothing but a weather-cock!

Vittorio Bersezio.