'Let me see the good one, by all means,' said Ippolito. 'I wish to play on it—not to see it! I have seen hundreds of organs.'
'Hundreds of organs!' exclaimed the man to himself. 'Capers! This stranger has travelled much! But if it is indeed not too hot for you,' he said, addressing Ippolito, 'we will go to Santa Vittoria.'
'It is not hot at this hour,' laughed Orsino. 'We have walked up from Camaldoli.'
'On foot!' The fat sacristan either was, or pretended to be, amazed. 'Great signori like you to come all that distance on foot!'
'What is there surprising in that?' enquired Ippolito. 'We have legs.'
'Birds also have legs,' observed the man. 'But they fly. It is only the chickens that walk, like poor people. I say that money is wings. If I were a great signore, like you, I would not even walk upstairs. I would be carried. Why should I walk? In order to be tired? It would be a folly, if I were rich. I, if you ask me, I like to eat well, to drink well, and then to sleep well. A man who could do these three things should be always happy. But the poor are always in thought.'
'So are the rich,' observed Ippolito.
'Yes, signore, for their souls, for we are all sinners; but not for their bodies, because they have always something to eat. What do I say? They eat meat every day, and so they are strong and have no thought for their bodies. But one of us, what does he eat? A little bread, a little salad, an onion, and with this in our bodies we have to move the earth. The world is thus made. Patience!'
Thus philosophising, the fat man rolled unwieldily along beside the two gentlemen, swinging his keys in his hand.
'If I had made the world, it should be another thing,' he continued, for he was a loquacious man. 'In the first place, I would have made wine clear, like water, and I would have made water black, like wine. Thus if the wine-seller put water into his wine, we should all see it. Another thing I would have done. I would have made corn grow on trees, like olives. In that way, we should have planted it once in two hundred years, as we do the olive trees, and there would have been less fatigue. Is not that a good thought?'