nd, and the olive grove beyond that, and much good land in
the valley. For they were galantuomini, and even thought themselves
something better, and sometimes, when the wine was new, they talked of
noble blood and said that their first ancestor had indeed been a son of
a king who had given him all Verbicaro for his own. True it is, at
least, that they had no other name. Through generation after generation
they were christened Ruggiero, Guglielmo, and Sebastiano "of the
Children of the King." Thus they had anciently appeared in the ill-kept
parish registers, and thus was Ruggiero inscribed for the conscription
under the new law.

And now, as you know, gaunt, weather-beaten Luigione, licensed master in
the coast trade and just now captain of the Sorrentine felucca
Giovannina, from Amalfi to Diamante with macaroni, there are no more of
the Children of the King in old Verbicaro, and their goods have fallen
into divers hands, but chiefly into those very grasping and
close-holding ones of Don Pietro Casale and his wife. But they are not
all dead by any means, as you know also and you have even lately seen
and talked with one of the fair-haired fellows, who bears the name.

For the Children of the King have almost always had yellow hair and blue
eyes, though they have more than once taken to themselves black-browed,
brown-skinned Calabrian girls as wives. And this makes one, who knows
something more about your country than you do, Luigione--though in a
less practical way I confess--this makes one think that they may be the
modern descendants of some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for
himself one morning in the old days, and kept it; or perhaps even the
far-off progeny of one of those bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who
made slaves of the degenerate Latins some thirteen centuries ago or
more, and treated their serfs indeed more like cattle than slaves until
almost the last of them were driven into the sea with their King Teias
by Narses. But a few were left in the southern fastnesses and in the
Samnite hills, and northward through the Apennines, scattered here and
there where they had been able to hold their own; and some, it is said,
forgot Theodoric and Witiges and Totila and Teias, and took service in
the Imperial Guard at Constantinople, as Harold of Norway and some of
our own hard-fisted sailor fathers did in later years.

Be that as it may--and no one knows how it was--the Children of the King
have yellow hair an