ng up the cliff and
through a garden belonging to a large house. I assumed that Angelo had
been arranging something in dialect and asked the corporal, who happened
to be next me, where we were going. He first picked a geranium most
politely and stuck it in my button-hole; then he told me we were going to
the big house which was the caserma. It appeared that he had been so
overcome by my hospitality that he had invited Angelo to bring me to call
upon the brigadier and his companions-in-arms at the guard-house. It was
really Angelo who had shown the hospitality, nevertheless, though not
directly responsible for all details, I was responsible for having
shifted the responsibility on Angelo by making him padrone of the
expedition, so that the hospitality was in a sense mine. But if left to
myself, I should never have had the courage to invite two such
influential members of the legal profession as a coastguard and a
policeman to lunch with me, not to speak of the third man who might have
been anything from a sheriff's officer to the Lord Chancellor himself.
But they were all friends of Angelo and so was I and in Sicily the maxim
"Gli amici dei nostri amici sono i nostri" is acted upon quite literally.

Passing through the door of the caserma we entered a large oblong room;
at each end were three or four beds and on the side opposite the door two
open windows. Through the windows across a barley-field, lightly stirred
by the breeze from the sea, the Temple of Apollo was lying in the heat,
an extinct heap of ruins, as though the naughty boy of some family of
Cyclopes had spilt his brother's box of bricks. In the middle of the
room ten or twelve men were sitting round a table on which were dishes of
what at first I took to be some kind of frutta di mare, objects about the
size and shape of sea-urchins. The brigadier received me with great
courtesy and put me to sit next him, and the corporal sat on the other
side of me. A dreamy Sunday afternoon feeling pervaded the air, the
brigadier said they were slaughtering time ("bisogna ammazzare un po' di
tempo"). Being to a certain extent soldiers, their business was to kill
something and they were compassing the destruction of their present enemy
by drinking wine and eating not sea-urchins but cold boiled artichokes.
He gave me some and begged me to make myself at home. The corporal
clinked glasses with me and said that the wine was better than that at
the locanda, wherein