"Not a nutshell," said I.
"Could not you go by telegraph?" said Frank, pointing up to the dumb old semaphore in whose tower he had established himself. "Or has not the chief got a wishing carpet? Or can't you ride to Gallipoli? Here are some excellent white-tailed mules, good enough for Pindar, whom Colvocoressis has just brought in from the monastery. 'Transportation for one!' Is there anything to be brought back? Nitre, powder, lead, junk, hard-tack, mules, horses, pigs, polenta, or olla podrida, or other of the stores of war?"
No; there was nothing to bring back except myself. Lucky enough if I came back to tell my own story. And so we walked up on the tower deck to take a look.
Blessed St. Lazarus, chief of Naples and of beggars! a little felucca was just rounding the Horse Head and coming into the bay, wing-wing. The fishermen in her had no thought that they were ever going to get into the Atlantic. May be they had never heard of the Ocean or of the Monthly. Can that be possible? Frank nodded, and I. He filled up with more Tunisian, beckoned to an orderly, and we walked down to the landing-jetty to meet them.
"Viva Italia!" shouted Frank, as they drew near enough to hear.
"Viva Garibaldi!" cried the skipper, as he let his sheet fly and rounded to the well-worn stones. A good voyage had they made of it, he and his two brown, ragged boys. Large fish and small, pink fish, blue, yellow, orange, striped fish and mottled, wriggled together, and flapped their tails in the well of the little boat. There were even too many to lie there and wriggle. The bottom of the boat was well covered with them, and, if she had not shipped waves enough to keep them cool, the boy Battista had bailed a plenty on them. Father and son hurried on shore, and Battista on board began to fling the scaly fellows out to them.
A very small craft it was to double all those capes in, run the straits, and stretch across the bay. If it had been mine "to make reply," I should undoubtedly have made this, that I would see the quartermaster hanged, and his superiors, before I risked myself in any such rattletrap. But as, unfortunately, it was mine to go where I was sent, I merely set the orderly to throwing out fish with the boys, and began to talk with the father.
Queer enough, just at that moment, there came over me the feeling that, as a graduate of the University, it was my duty to put up those red, white, and blue scaly fellows, who were flopping about there so briskly, and send them in alcohol to Agassiz. But there are so many duties of that kind which one neglects in a hard-worked world! As a graduate, it is my duty to send annually to the College Librarian a list of all the graduates who have died in the town I live in, with their fathers' and mothers' names, and the motives that led them to College, with anecdotes of their career, and the date of their death. There are two thousand three hundred and forty-five of them I believe, and I have never sent one half-anecdote about one! Such failure in duty made me grimly smile as I omitted to stop and put up these fish in alcohol, and as I plied the unconscious skipper with inquiries about his boat. "Had she ever been outside?" "O signor, she had been outside this very day. You cannot catch tonno till you have passed both capes,—least of all such fine fish as that is,"—and he kicked the poor wretch. Can it be true, as C—— says, that those dying flaps of theirs, are exquisite luxury to them, because for the first time they have their fill of oxygen? "Had he ever been beyond Peloro?" "O yes, signor; my wife, Caterina, was herself from Messina,"—and on great saints' days they had gone there often. Poor fellow, his great saint's day sealed his fate. I nodded to Frank,—Frank nodded to me,—and Frank blandly informed him that, by order of General Garibaldi, he would take the gentleman at once on board, pass the strait with him, "and then go where he tells you."
The Southern Italian has the reputation, derived from Tom Moore, of being a coward. When I used to speak at school,
"Ay, down to the dust with them,—slaves as they are!"—