generally
after would be the death. But you must pay. If to pay less would come
only one priest and not well dressed, if to pay more, very well dressed
and too many priests. If to pay plenty, plenty, then to ring all the
bells and enter by the great door; but if to pay few, then not many bells
and to enter by the second door. Did you understand?

"When they die the parents always, and also the man that is to die, they
fear the--please, what is not the paradiso? Excuse me, it is the
inferno: and they tell to the priest 'Please come.' Then they pay him to
tell all that is good, and sometimes the priest arrive that you will be
dead. If you shall suicide, very likely you are dead before. Then shall
the parents pay him to tell that the man to die has taken all the
functions of religion and the holy oil to put in the foot to prevent him
the death. But it is prevent not at all.

"Did you know what is sacramento? All right, I shall tell you. The
priest is going with the sacramento on the hand and the umbrella on the
head and you must pay--always must pay, it is the interesting thing. And
the old women are going and are praying because the man is dead: and the
soldiers are going and are taking the arms before the risorgimento, but
now the law it is redeemed. Then they arrive into the room of the malade
and take the sacramento and up and down and put the holy oil in the foot
and pray and went away, and the malade who is not dead would very soonly
die."

CHAPTER III--THE PROFESSOR

The day before the festa there came a professor of pedagogy, and Peppino
was not best pleased to see him because he knew him as a jettatore. I
had supposed this word to mean a person with the evil eye who causes
misfortunes to others, but he used it in the sense of one who causes
misfortunes to himself or, at least, who is always in trouble--a man who
is constitutionally unfortunate, the sort of man with whom Napoleon would
have nothing to do. He will miss his train more often than not; if he
has to attend a funeral it will be when he has a cold in his head, and
all his white pocket-handkerchiefs will be at the wash, so that he must
use a coloured one; he will attempt to take his medicine in the dark,
thereby swallowing the liniment by mistake. Of course, this kind of man
is incidentally disastrous to others as well as to himself and is,
therefore, also a jettatore in the other sense, so that Napoleon was
quite right.

The a