rong and I am weak,
Transfer to my heart the load of your passengers
And take in exchange the weight of my sorrows.

Next time I saw the professor he was in charge of a newspaper kiosk in
Palermo, looking older and more dilapidated and still waiting for the
manna to fall from heaven. He complained of the slackness of trade. He
also complained that the work was too hard and was killing him; so that,
one way or the other, he intended to shut up the kiosk and look out for
something else.

CATANIA

CHAPTER V--MICHELE AND THE PRINCESS OF BIZERTA

Educated Sicilians have not a high opinion of the marionettes; it is
sometimes difficult to induce them to talk on the subject. They say the
marionettes are for the lower orders and accuse them of being responsible
for many of the quarrels we read about in the newspapers. The people
become so fascinated by the glamour of the romance in which they live
night after night that they imitate in private life the chivalrous
behaviour of the warriors they see fighting in the little theatres, and
thus what may begin as a playful reminiscence of something in last
night's performance occasionally leads to a too accurate imitation of one
of last night's combats and perhaps ends in a fatal wound. This being
like the accounts in English papers about boys becoming hooligans or
running off to sea as stowaways in consequence of reading trashy
literature, my desire to attend a performance of marionettes was
increased, but I did not want to go alone for, in the event of a row,
with knives, among the audience it would be better to be accompanied by a
native.

I was in Palermo where I knew a few students, whose education was of
course still incomplete, but they were cold on the subject and said that
if they came with me we should probably be turned out for laughing. That
was not what I wanted. It ought to have been possible to do something
with the waiter or the porter, or even with the barber whom I met on the
stairs and in the passages of the hotel when he came in the morning to
shave the commercial travellers; but they all made difficulties--either
they did not get away from their work till too late, or it was not a
place for an Englishman or it was not safe. At home, of course, one does
not go to the theatre with the waiter, but when in Sicily, though one
does not perhaps do altogether as the Sicilians, one does not do as one
does in England. I know a Palermitan barb