At noon work comes to a halt. Francesco taps at the office door and announces:

“Dinny ready, Mister!” Francesco is a Sicilian of the Greek type, straight as a lance, with a fine head, thick curling hair and eyes of gray sapphire. He escaped unhurt from his house the morning after the earthquake, after lying for hours under the ruins.

At dinner Belknap sits at the head of the long table; on his right is Brofferio. Then seated in the order of their rank come the officers, the “architect,” as they call J., and the master-carpenters. The table is laid with neatness—for a camp, with elegance. There is a white table-cloth with napkins, borrowed from the “Celtic;” at either end stands a bowl filled with pale quince blossoms, wreathed with ivy—winding ivy besprent with purple berries, the kind that twined the bacchantes’ thyrsus. This is Gasperone’s idea, the touch of the æsthetic, the legacy of Hellas, that every day and every hour you see in Sicily, that makes this land and its people rich in grace beyond all others.

“Them flowers looks kinder pretty,” said Timothy, the carpenter. He made a mental note to write his wife about Gasperone’s decoration of the “mess” table.

Francesco and Gasperone, the Sicilian servants, have a third helper, Mr. Buchanan’s “boy,” a magnificent negro. This full-blooded African giant stands six-feet-two; he is broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, with teeth like new-peeled almonds and eyes like the big Sicilian oxen. He has the same pictorial “value” as the blacks Paul Veronese painted in his Venetian feasts.

Dinner begins with a loin of good roast American pork from the “Celtic’s” store. The big negro offers a dish to go with the pork, whispering in a gentle lisp:

“Apple thause, thir?”

After dinner there is a short pause; work only begins again at one o’clock. Pipes are lighted; in Flagstaff Square the sailors have a game of baseball, watched and cheered by a delighted crowd of Messinesi. Work is over for the men at halfpast five, for the masters

AVVOCATO DONATI. [Page 238.] MR. BUCHANAN’S “BOY” AND HIS MATES. [Page 258.]