“Behold, Madama, l’asino del colonello!” said Ercole.
“Who is the colonel?”
“Un gran signore, un Inglese. He comes here every year for the baths.”
“What can a gran signore do with this poor little animal?”
“He protects it. When he first saw this donkey, the poor beast being much afflicted with sores, was sadly tormented by flies. The colonello taking pity upon it provided pantaloons—two pair; a pair for the hind legs, a pair for the fore legs, as you perceive. He also pays the boys two francs a month to treat the creature well; he provides petroleum to bathe its sores, and now and again orders it a sea bath. It is his idea. He may be right. How do I know? With respect, the soul of his grandmother may have entered the body of that ass.”
A little further on Ercole drew up the piebald again.
“Behold other of the colonello’s beneficiaries,” he said. Two tiny dwarfs saluted us, asking with Ischian gentleness for alms. There was no whine to their voices, no consciousness of degradation, nothing of that brazen effrontery of the Neapolitan beggar, which makes one despair of the regeneration of the Neapolitan “submerged tenth”!
“Sono buoni ed onesti (They are good and honest),” said Ercole, adding a soldo from his own pocket to what J. gave them.
“They are called Pasquale and Restituta. It is only a few years that they have been obliged to beg. They worked at their trades—he at brick making, she at straw braiding; they are past working now. They are not very old, but such people have little vigor. I remember their wedding. All the town was there, the sindaco and the schoolmaster as well. We all gave something for their housekeeping, one a goat, one a pair of fowls, one a piece of furniture. If you could have seen their little marriage-bed, Signora mia, it was like a doll’s bed.”
We drove along for another mile or two, passed the straw factory, where we were obliged to buy some ugly fans, out of respect to Ercole’s views. On the Marina he stopped again to let us see “Il Fungo,” a big mushroom-shaped rock in the sea. The setting sun touched Procida into an unearthly beauty, it shone like the golden city of Jerusalem.