ave made a narrow
beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice. The new
bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you
came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets. A
glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of
one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.
Somebody must have cheated. Nothing new in that. They are all thieves
nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict
simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination. At all events this
bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath they
have made through its ruins, and up the other side.

And now you are in the town. The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is not
Naples, not Salerno, not even Amalfi. The pavement is of the roughest
cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers. Pigs everywhere, in the
streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps of the church in
the market-place, to right and left, before you and behind you--like the
guns at Balaclava. You never heard of the Six Hundred, though your
father was boatswain of a Palermo grain bark and lay three months in the
harbour of Sebastapol during the fighting.

Pigs everywhere, black, grunting and happy. Red-skirted, scarlet-bodiced
women everywhere, too, all moving and carrying something. Galantuomini
loafing at most of the corners, smoking clay pipes with cane stems, and
the great Jew shopkeeper's nose just visible from a distance as he
stands in the door of his dingy den. Dirtier and dirtier grow the cobble
stones as you go on. Brighter and brighter the huge bunches of red
peppers fastened by every window, thicker and thicker on the upper walls
and shaky balconies the black melons and yellowish grey cantelopes hung
up to keep in the high fresh air, each slung in a hitch of yarn to a
nail of its own.

Here and there some one greets you. What have you to sell? Will you take
a cargo of pears? Good this year, like all the fruit. The figs and
grapes will not be dry for another month. They nod and move on, as you
pass by them. Verbicaro is a commercial centre, in spite of the pigs. A
tall, thin priest meets you, with a long black cigar in his mouth. When
he catches your eye he takes it from between his teeth and knocks the
ash off, seeing that you are a stranger. Perhaps it is not very clerical
to smoke in the streets. But who cares? This is Verbicaro--and besid