“Do you love your Dod, ’ittle fy?”
“Do you want to see your Dod, ’ittle fy?”
“Well” (with a vicious jab of the finger), “you shall!”
And with the last word the soul of the fly had departed to settle its accounts in another world. Writing here in Siena, the most fly-accursed or Beelzebubbed town in Italy, on July 25th, being detained by illness, I love that little angel of a girl, and think with utter loathing and contempt of dear old Uncle Toby and his “Go—go, poor fly!” True, I agree with him to his second “go,” but there our sentiments diverge—the reader may complete the sentence for himself—out of Ernulphus!
On which the wise Flaxius comments as follows on the proof with his red pencil:
“It hath been observed by the learned that the speed of a fly, were he to make even a slight effort to go directly onwards, would be from seventy to eighty miles an hour, during which transit he would find far more attractive food, pleasanter places wherein to buzz about, and more beautiful views than he meets with in this humble room of mine, wherein I, from hour to hour, do with a towel rise and slay his kind. Oh, reader! how many men there are who, to soaring far and wide in life amid honeyed flowers and pleasant places, prefer to buzz about in short flights in little rooms where they can tease some one, and defile all they touch as domestic gossips do—but, ’tis enough! Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur!”
THE ROMAN VASE
a legend of bellosguardo
“From Tuscan Bellosguardo
Where Galileo stood at nights to take
The vision of the stars, we have found it hard,
Gazing upon the earth and heavens, to make
A choice of beauty.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Bellosguardo is an eminence on a height, crowned with an ancient, castle-like monastery, from which there is a magnificent view of Florence. It is a haunted legendary spot; fate and witches sweep round its walls by night, while the cry of the civetta makes music for their aërial dance, and in the depths of the hill lie buried mystic treasures, or the relics of mysterious beings of the olden time, and the gnome of the rocks there has his dwelling in subterranean caves. Of this place I have the following legend from Maddalena:
Il Vaso Romano.