“Hush,” I said; “we will not pursue our inquiries into detail.”
Well, the Theorem of Pythagoras has, as you see, cost me a new and very serious humiliation. In spite of this, I no longer keep up the old grudge. There will never be any confidence between us, but I consider it as a family friend whom we must not treat with rudeness, though he may not be personally congenial to ourselves.
Enrico Castelnuovo.
AN ECCENTRIC ORDERLY.
Of originals there is a great variety under the canopy of heaven; and I have enjoyed the acquaintance of several, but among them all I never met his match.
He was a Sardinian peasant, twenty years old, unable to read or write, and a private in an infantry regiment.
The first time I saw him, at Florence, in the office of a military journal, he inspired me with a certain sympathy. I soon understood, however, from his looks and some of his answers, that he was a character. His very appearance was paradoxical: seen in front, he was one man; looked at in profile, he was another. Of the full face there was nothing particular to remark; it was a countenance like any other; but it seemed as though in the act of turning his head he became a different man, and the profile had something irresistibly ludicrous about it. The point of his chin and the tip of his nose seemed to be trying to meet, and to be hindered by an enormous thick-lipped mouth which was always open, and showed two rows of teeth, uneven as a file of national guards. His eyes were scarcely larger than pin-heads, and disappeared altogether among the wrinkles into which his face was puckered when he laughed. His eyebrows were shaped like two circumflex accents, and his forehead was scarcely high enough to keep his hair out of his eyes. A friend of mine remarked to me that he seemed to be one of Nature’s practical jokes. And yet his face expressed intelligence and good-nature; but an intelligence which was, so to speak, sporadic, and a good-nature entirely sui generis. He spoke, in a harsh, hoarse voice, an Italian for which he had every right to claim the inventor’s patent.
“How do you like Florence?” I asked, seeing that he had arrived in that city the day before.
“It’s not bad,” he replied.
Coming from a man who had previously only seen Cagliari, and one or two small towns in Northern Italy, the answer seemed to savour of a certain austerity.