The lime-dealer objected to the Saint Joseph's ass because it was covered with worse scars than his other beasts, with its legs seared by the hot iron, and the skin on its chest worn off by the poitrel, and the withers raw by the chafing of the plow, and the knees barked by constant falls, and then that pelt of black and white seemed to him so inharmonious among his other brown-skinned animals.
"That makes no difference," replied compare Luciano. "Besides, it will serve to distinguish your asses at a distance."
But he deducted two tarì from the seven lire that he had asked, so as to bring the business to a settlement.
Now the Saint Joseph's ass would not have been recognized even by the padrona who had been present when it was born, so greatly had it changed as it stumbled along with its nose to the ground and its ears curled over like an umbrella under the lime-dealer's heavy sacks, twitching its flanks under the blows of the youth who drove the caravan. But then the padrona herself was changed at that time, what with the bad harvests they had gathered and the hunger from which she had suffered, and the fevers which they had all contracted in the low lands, she and her husband and her Turiddu, while they had no money to buy any more quinine at the apothecary's and at the same time they had no more asses even of the Saint Joseph kind to sell for the small price of thirty-five lire!
In winter, when there was little work and the wood for burning the lime was scarce, and to be had only at a distance, and the frozen paths hadn't a leaf on their hedges or a mouthful of stubble along by the icy gutters, life was still harder for those poor brutes, and the padrone knew that in winter not half as much was eaten; so he used to buy a good stock of provisions in the spring.
At night the drove remained in the open air near the lime-burners, and the brutes clustered together for protection against the cold. But those stars shining like swords through and through them in spite of their thick hides, and all those ulcer-eaten beasts shook and trembled in the cold as if they were human beings.
But then there are many Christians who are not better off, not having even such a ragged coat as that wrapt up in which the herd-boy slept before the furnace.
Near by there lived a poor widow in a dilapidated hut, more tumble-down by far than the lime-furnace, and through its roof the stars penetrated like swords, as if it were no roof at all, and the wind fluttered the wretched rags of her covering. At first she took in washing, but that was meagre pay, for the people thereabouts do their own washing, when they wash at all, and now that her little boy had grown she went about peddling wood in the village. No one had known her husband and no one knew where she got the wood that she sold; that was known only by her son, who went about picking it up here and there at the risk of getting shot by the campieri.
"If you only had an ass!" the lime-dealer had said to her, hoping that he might dispose of that Saint Joseph's ass, which was good for nothing more, "then you could take down to the village much bigger fagots, now that your son is getting to be grown up."
The poor woman had a few lire in the knot of her handkerchief, and she let herself be persuaded into it by the lime-burner, because it is said that "old things go to destruction in the house of a fool."