And she said it was. Next day my stomach was bad too.
I told her I had been married, but had lost my wife and had determined never to marry again till I could find a widow whom I had admired as a married woman.
Giovanni, the new waiter, explained to me that the butcher was not really bad or cruel at all. I shook my head at him and said I wished I could think so, but that his poor wife looked very ill and unhappy.
The housemaid’s name was La Rosa Mistica.
The landlord was a favourite with all the guests. Every one patted him on the cheeks or the head, or chucked him under the chin, or did something nice and friendly at him. He was a little man with a face like a russet pippin apple, about sixty-five years old, but made of iron. He was going to marry a third wife, and six young women had already come up from S. Ambrogio to be looked at. I saw one of them. She was a Visigoth-looking sort of person and wore a large wobbly-brimmed straw hat; she was about forty, and gave me the impression of being familiar with labour of all kinds. He pressed me to give my opinion of her, but I sneaked out of it by declaring that I must see a good deal more of the lady than I was ever likely to see before I could form an opinion at all.
On coming down from the sanctuary one afternoon I heard the landlord’s comic song, of which I have spoken above. It was about the musical instruments in a band: the trumpet did this, the clarinet did that, the flute went tootle, tootle, tootle, and there was an appropriate motion of the hand for every instrument. I was a little disappointed with it, but the landlord said I was too serious and the only thing that would cure me was to learn the song myself. He said the butcher had learned it already, so it was not hard, which indeed it was not. It was about as hard as:
The battle of the Nile
I was there all the while
At the battle of the Nile.
I had to learn it and sing it (Heaven help me, for I have no more voice than a mouse!), and the landlord said that the motion of my little finger was very promising.
The chestnuts are never better than after harvest, when they are heavy-laden with their pale green hedgehog-like fruit and alive with people swarming among their branches, pruning them while the leaves are still good winter food for cattle. Why, I wonder, is there such an especial charm about the pruning of trees? Who does not feel it? No matter what the tree is, the poplar of France, or the brookside willow or oak coppice of England, or the chestnuts or mulberries of Italy, all are interesting when being pruned, or when pruned just lately. A friend once consulted me casually about a picture on which he was at work, and complained that a row of trees in it was without sufficient interest. I was fortunate enough to be able to help him by saying: “Prune them freely and put a magpie’s nest in one of them,” and the trees became interesting at once. People in trees always look well, or rather, I should say, trees always look well with people in them, or indeed with any living thing in them, especially when it is of a kind that is not commonly seen in them; and the measured lop of the bill-hook and, by and by, the click as a bough breaks and the lazy crash as it falls over on to the ground, are as pleasing to the ear as is the bough-bestrewn herbage to the eye.
To what height and to what slender boughs do not these hardy climbers trust themselves. It is said that the coming man is to be toeless. I will venture for it that he will not be toeless if these chestnut-pruning men and women have much to do with his development. Let the race prune chestnuts for a couple of hundred generations or so, and it will have little trouble with its toes. Of course, the pruners fall sometimes, but very rarely. I remember in the Val Mastallone seeing a votive picture of a poor lady in a short petticoat and trousers trimmed with red round the bottom who was falling head foremost from the top of a high tree, whose leaves she had been picking, and was being saved by the intervention of two saints who caught her upon two gridirons. Such accidents, however, and, I should think, such interventions, are exceedingly rare, and as a rule the peasants venture freely into places which in England no one but a sailor or a steeple-jack would attempt.