The travellers ask for whom. “For one of the socialists whom the government has pardoned out of prison. He is coming now in the steamer from Naples.”—“What kind of a man is he?”—“His name is Bosco, and the people love him.”
There are preparations everywhere in the night for his sake. One of the goatherds on Monte Pellegrino is busy tying little bunches of blue-bells for his goats to wear in their collars. And as he has a hundred goats, and they all wear collars—But it must be done. His goats could not wander into Palermo the next morning without being adorned in honor of the day.
The dressmakers have had to sit at their work till midnight to finish all the new dresses that are to be worn that morning. And when such a little dressmaker has finished her work for others, she has to think of herself. She puts a couple of plumes in her hat and piles up bunches of ribbon a yard high. To-day she must be beautiful.
The long rows of houses begin to be illuminated. Here and there a rocket whizzes up. Fire-crackers hiss and snap at every street corner.
The flower shops along Via Vittorio Emanuele are emptied again and again. Always more, more of the white orange-blossoms! All Palermo is filled with the sweet fragrance of the orange-blossoms.
The gate-keeper in Bosco’s house has no peace for a moment. Magnificent cakes and towerlike bouquets are incessantly passing up the stairway, and poems of welcome and telegrams of congratulation are constantly coming. There is no end to them.
The poor bronze emperor on the Piazza Bologna, poor, ugly Charles the Fifth, who is forlorn and thin and wretched as San Giovanni in the desert, has in some inscrutable manner got a bunch of flowers in his hand. When the students standing on Quattro Canti, quite near by, hear of it, they march up to the emperor in a procession, light him with their torches, and raise a cheer for the old despot. And one of them takes his bunch of flowers to give it to the great socialist.
Then the students march down to the harbor.
Long before they get there their torches are burnt out, but they do not care. They come with arms about each other’s necks, singing loudly, and sometimes breaking off in their song to shout: “Down with Crispi! Long live Bosco!” The song begins again, but it is again broken off, because those who cannot sing throw their arms round the singers and kiss them.
Guilds and corporations swarm out of the quarters of the town where the same trade has been carried on for more than a thousand years. The masons come with their band of music and their banner; there come the workers in mosaic; here come the fishermen.