es,
it is not a pipe. Monks smoke pipes. Priests smoke cigars.

One more turn down a narrow lane--darkest and dirtiest of all the lanes,
the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal black
puddle. Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the Basso
Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of the
Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the
pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger and
street sweeper.

This is Don Pietro Casale's house, the last on the right, with the steep
staircase running up outside the building to the second story. And the
staircase has an iron railing, and so narrows the lane that a broad
shouldered man can just go by to the cabbage garden beyond without
turning sideways. On the landing at the top, outside the closed door
and waiting for visitors, sits the pig--a pig larger, better fed and by
one shade of filthiness cleaner than other pigs. Don Pietro Casale has
been seen to sweep his pig with a broken willow broom, after it has
rained.

"Do you take him for a Christian?" asked his neighbour, in amazement, on
the occasion.

"No," answered Don Pietro gravely. "He is certainly not a Christian. But
why should he spoil the tablecloth with his muddy hog's back when my
guests are at their meals? He is always running under the table for the
scraps."

"And what are women for, except to wash tablecloths?" inquired the
neighbour contemptuously.

But he got no answer. Few people ever get more than one from Don Pietro
Casale, whose eldest son is doing well at Buenos Ayres, and in whose
house the postmaster takes his meals now that he is a widower.

For Don Pietro and his wife Donna Concetta sell their own wine and keep
a cook-shop, besides a guest-room with a garret above it, and two beds,
with an old-fashioned store of good linen in old-fashioned iron-bound
chests. At the time of the fair they can put up a dozen or fourteen
guests. People say indeed that the place is not so well managed, nor the
cooking so good since poor Carmela died, the widow of Ruggiero dei Figli
del Re--Roger of the Children of the King.

For this is the place where the Children of the King lived and died for
many generations, and this house of Don Pietro Casale was theirs, and
the one on the other side of the cabbage garden, a smaller and poorer
one, in which Carmela died. The garden itself was once theirs, and the
vineyard beyo