Salami? I thanked her. I know Calabrian pigs and what they feed on, though it would be hard to describe in the language of polite society.
Despite the heat and the swarms of flies in that chamber, I felt little desire for repose after her simple repast; the dame was so affable and entertaining that we soon became great friends. I caused her some amusement by my efforts to understand and pronounce her language—these folk speak Albanian and Italian with equal facility—which seemed to my unpractised ears as hopeless as Finnish. Very patiently, she gave me a long lesson during which I thought to pick up a few words and phrases, but the upshot of it all was:
“You’ll never learn it. You have begun a hundred years too late.”
I tried her with modern Greek, but among such fragments as remained on my tongue after a lapse of over twenty years, only hit upon one word that she could understand.
“Quite right!” she said encouragingly. “Why don’t you always speak properly? And now, let me hear a little of your own language.”
I gave utterance to a few verses of Shakespeare, which caused considerable merriment.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she asked, “that people really talk like that?”
“Of course they do.”
“And pretend to understand what it means?”
“Why, naturally.”