[2] ‘Cece,’ vetch, produces a very large pea in the south of Europe, and provides a staple article of food much liked among the lower orders. In Italy it is mostly eaten plain boiled, often cold, or else in soup and stews. All day long men go about the streets in Rome selling them (plain boiled) in wooden pails. Boys buy a handful as they would cherries, and eat them as they go along. In Spain, where it bears the name of ‘garbanzo,’ the favourite mode of cooking it is stewed in oil, with a large quantity of red pepper. [↑]
[3] ‘Coratella,’ nice little heart. [↑]
‘O la vitella,
O la zitella.’
‘Vitella,’ a calf; ‘zitella,’ an unmarried person. [↑]
DOCTOR GRILLO.
Doctor Grillo was a physician who had made himself a great name throughout his whole country, so that he was sent for and consulted from far and wide, and everybody looked up to him as a very wise man, whose word was final on any question of medicine. The discovery that ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ was made long before the idea so found expression in the seventeenth century; Doctor Grillo had a man-servant who chose to entertain a very different notion of his merits and powers from that of the rest of the world; and in time, from undervaluing his attainments, he came to conceive the belief that he could himself do just as well as his master.
One day, when the Doctor was out, this serving-man took into his head to roll up into a great bundle his doctor’s gown and cap,[1] a number of prescriptions, and a quantity of bottles, and with these he stole away and betook himself to a far country, where he gave himself out for the famed Doctor Grillo.