The blind man, in going out, closed the door with such a tremendous bang that he put out Modesta’s lamp; and returning to his disconsolate hut, wished two or three apoplexies to that meddling vagabond of a friar who had deprived him of those poor clothes and the remains of the supper, with which it was the archdeacon’s annual custom to reward the four poor wretches for their labours in the belfry. Having reached his house, he told his wife the good tidings of the eggs at Easter, and fell asleep in the time it takes to tell it. But that night he saw in his dreams neither flowers, nor cities, nor seas bright in the sunshine. He dreamed instead that he was the stout director of the manganese mines, and that he was sitting in a nicely-warmed room at a well-spread table, and just tasting the full flavour of a fat roast fowl. He was just at work on one of the legs when his wife began to turn him over and call him to get up. He struggled with his hands, feeling the director of the mines gradually disappear, and a moment later he became aware that he was only blind Phœbus. Then he hit himself a great thump on the head, and started up because he heard the bells ringing for sermon. When he had got into church he sat down close to the sacristy door, so that the archdeacon might be sure to see him. The preacher seemed to be flinging squalls of rain and wind, and all the devils of hell down from the pulpit on all the crowded, uncovered heads. Phœbus paid no attention to him. When he came out, certain good-for-nothing youngsters, loafing outside, shouted after him—
“Phœbus! Phœbus! what has the preacher been saying?”
“I don’t know!” he replied. “I was thinking of the eggs!”
“By Bacchus! the archdeacon is quite right in thinking him a little cracked! But I do believe that he would be a true believer if he saw the Divine Master’s teachings practised a little better, and also a little to his advantage!”
This was what the chaplain said to himself as he came out from the service, with displeasure still written on his face, and also a certain timid disgust, whether provoked by living men or by the dead, whom he was constantly obliged to see, I do not know.
Mario Pratesi.
OUR SCHOOL AND SCHOOLMISTRESS.
We used to go to school, Sofia and I, with a certain Signora Romola. They were very lavish with Greek and Roman names in our village in those days. Teofilo, Pompeo, Lucrezia, Collatino, Quintilia, were appellations frequently bestowed in baptism. Signora Romola was a strongly-built woman, plump and ruddy of face, and with a soft voice, too soft indeed for the air of severity which she wished to assume. It was her aim to strike awe into us with a glance. In fact we scarcely dared to breathe in her presence, by reason of that terrible glance which slowly swept the class, and she always used to say that it was quite sufficient. “I make them tremble with a glance,” she often told people; and as soon as she made her majestic entrance into school there was immediate silence, a fact of which she was very proud. They used to say she had been a beauty in her youth; I would not be persuaded of the truth of this statement. Her husband was Signor Capponio the chemist, who formed a complete contrast to her. He was a long, thin, thread-paper of a man, with a pair of great spectacles on his big nose, and sharp chin and cheek-bones which seemed to make a triangle in his honest face. He always wore a buffalo-skin cap, with a peak curved like a bird’s beak. I always imagined that he must have come into the world in that cap; I never saw him without it. He could play the flute, and often performed a tune for us boys during our play-hour, stamping vivaciously with one foot, and accompanying with his head, no less vivaciously, the motion of his fingers on the keys. We stood around him with our noses in the air, as though we had been gazing up at the top of a church tower, and held out our arms trying to seize the instrument, whose construction we were eager to examine; but, refusing to let go, he played on as vigorously as before—or even more so—and at last made his escape, saying, “You’ll spoil it! you’ll spoil it!” He had the name of a learned man; and he must, by what I have heard, have understood something of botany; but I think his reputation was really founded on certain sentences from Hippocrates and Galen, in Latin, written up in gilt letters over the shelves in his ancient shop. The gilding of the letters had turned black by reason of the flies which swarmed there, on which, in the summer, Capponio used to wage war—standing in the middle of his shop—by means of a stick with long strips of paper attached to it. I do not remember one of his many proverbs. He must have had a large stock of them, for it was often said, “As Capponio says, with his proverb! Eh!—honest man—he knows a lot about the world!” I used to think that the proverb was a person very much like Capponio himself—buffalo-skin cap and all—but still taller and more serious—appearing now here, now there—always unexpected, and at other times invisible.
Capponio was a great institution among us. Whenever we saw him we rushed up to him, dragging him by the skirts of his long, double-breasted, snuff-coloured coat. And then he would lift us up to let us see Lucca,[[27]] or show us how to turn somersaults. If, passing through the school-room, he saw one of us on his knees, with the fool’s cap on his head, or his eyes blindfolded, he would try to make fun of his wife’s austerities. She would sometimes inflict punishments even more humiliating than these—for instance, that most terrible one of all, of having to make crosses on the ground with one’s tongue.
“Come, come no sorrow—