nestled down in my arms, all the time gazing up at me with an expression of satisfied wonder, as though at last he understood something that had been puzzling him.  Peppino was present, but effaced himself by helping Carmelo with what he calls my “luggages.”  I suppose I exchanged the usual greetings with the parents, but they did not count, I had seen them since their marriage; this time I had come to see Enrico.  There was some difficulty about getting into the carriage, because they thought I could not do it unless they took him away, and he did not want to be taken away.  When we were settled, and Carmelo was driving us up the zig-zags, I said:

“Of course you don’t expect me to know much about babies, not being married or anything—but isn’t he an unusually fine child for his age?”

Brancaccia was much flattered and replied that recently, when they had bought him some new clothes, he took the size usually sold for babies of twice his age.  This made Peppino laugh at his wife, and say that the compare might not know much about babies, but he knew how to get on the right side of Ricuzzu’s mother.

“Why do you call him Ricuzzu?” I asked.

“Ricuzzu is Enrico in Sicilian.”

“Then I shall call him Ricuzzu also.”

“Of course, yes.”

The motion of the carriage soon sent the child to sleep.  I handed him back to Brancaccia, and looked at her as she sat with him in her arms.  She was more beautiful than before, because of something that has eluded the skill of all the painters who have striven to capture it for their hortus siccus of the Madonna and Child, something that Enrico had awakened in her heart, and that I saw glowing in her eyes and throbbing in all her movements.

“Isn’t he like Peppino?” asked Brancaccia.

“He is the very image of Peppino,” I replied; but I noticed that he also had Brancaccia’s blue eyes, and was promising to have her black hair.

We arrived at the Albergo della Madonna (con giardino) and Peppino took me up to my room.  Brancaccia had been before us, and had put an enormous bunch of flowers in water on the table to greet me.  I went out on the balcony, just to make sure that the panorama was still there, and, after putting myself straight, descended into the garden, where I found Peppino waiting for me, and where we were to have tea in the English manner—”sistema Inglese,” as Brancaccia said.

The English system is not always in working order at a moment’s notice, so we had time for a walk round.  The afternoon breeze was conducting a symphony of

perfumes, and, as we strolled among the blossoms that were the orchestra, we could identify the part played by each flower; sometimes one became more prominent, sometimes another, but always through the changing harmonies we could distinguish the stately canto fermo of the roses, counterpointed with a florid rhythm from the zagara.  If Flaubert had been writing in Sicilian, he could have said “una corona di zagara,” or, in English, “a wreath of orange-blossoms,” and he need not have worried himself to death by trying to elude the recurrent “de” of “une couronne de fleurs d’oranger.”  There was also music of another kind coming from a passero solitario (the blue rock thrush) who was hanging in a cage in a doorway.  We spoke to him, and he could not have made more fuss about us if we had been the King of Italy and the Pope of Rome paying him a visit.

I said, “Aren’t you pleased with your beautiful garden, Peppino?”

He replied, “Yes, and other things too.  Sometimes I am cross with my life; but I think of Brancaccia and the baby, and I look around me, and then I says to myself, ‘Ah, well, never mind!  Be a good boy!’“

Presently we came to a fountain which, when I turned a tap, twisted round and round, spouting out graceful, moving curves, and the drops fell in the basin below and disturbed the rose-leaves that were sleeping on the water.  I also found an image of the Madonna and Bambino in a corner, with an inscription in front promising forty days’ indulgence to anyone who should recite devoutly an Ave before it.  I understood this as well as one who is not a Roman Catholic can be said to understand such a promise, and better than I understood another image to which Peppino called my attention.  It was a small coloured crockery S. Giuseppe, standing on the top of the wall and looking into the garden, protected by a couple of tiles arranged over him as an inverted V, and held in place by dabs of mortar.

I said, “Why do you keep your patron saint on the wall like that?”

He replied that it had nothing to do with him.  The land over the wall belongs to the monks, and they put the saint up to gaze into the garden in the hope that Peppino’s father might thereby become gradually illuminated with the idea of giving them a piece of his land; they wanted it to join to their own, which is rather an awkward shape just there.  The influence of S. Giuseppe had already been at work four years, but Peppino’s father still remained obstinately unilluminated.

Carmelo brought the tea and set a chair for Ricuzzu, who has his own private meals like other babies but likes to sit up to the table and watch his father and mother having theirs, occasionally honouring their repast by trying his famous six—or is it seven?—teeth upon a crust, which he throws upon the ground when he has done with it.  So we all four sat together in the shade of the Japanese medlar-tree and talked about the changes in the town since my last visit.

First Peppino repeated something he had told me last time I was there, before Ricuzzu was born.  It was about the horror of that fatal night when he heard his father crying in the dark; he went to his parents’ room to find out what was the matter, and heard the old man babbling of being lost on Etna, wandering naked in the snow.  Peppino struck a light, which woke his father from his dream, but it did not wake his mother.  She had been lying for hours dead by her husband’s side.

When the body was laid out and the watchers were praying by it at night, the widower sat in a chair singing.  He was not in the room with the body, he had his own room, and his song was unlike anything Peppino had ever heard; it had no words, no rhythm, no beginning and no end, yet it was not moaning, it was a cantilena of real notes.  It seemed to be a comfort to him in his grief to pour these lamenting sounds out of his broken heart.  All the town

came to the funeral, for the family is held in much respect, and there were innumerable letters of condolence and wreaths of flowers.  When it was over, Peppino wrote a paragraph which appeared in the Corriere di Castellinaria:

A tutte le pie cortesi persone che con assistenza, con scritti, con l’intervento ai funebri della cara sventurata estinta, con adornarne di fiori l’ultima manifestazione terrena desiderarono renderne meno acre it dolore, ringraziamenti vivissimi porge la famiglia Pampalone.

He showed me this and waited while I copied it.  When I had finished he went on, talking more to himself than to me:

“The life it is not the same when we are wanting someone to be here that is gone away.  When we were young and this person was living, things it was so; now we can understand this person who is gone, and things it is other.  This is not a good thing.  Now is the time this dear person should be living; now would we be taking much care.”

For many weeks they feared lest the father might follow the mother, but he began to