lf a day, or it may be more, in company with one of these men.
He is usually a delightful person, dignified, kind, courteous, full of
fun and extremely friendly without being obtrusive. During conversation
one may perhaps ask him whether he can read and write; he will probably
reply that at school he was taught both. Presently one may ask him to
read an advertisement, or to write down an address; he will probably
reply that the light is bad, or that he is occupied with the luggage or
the horses. The fact is that reading and writing are to him very much
what the classics and the higher mathematics are to many an English
gentleman--the subjects were included in his youthful studies, but as
they have never been of the slightest use to him in earning his bread, he
has forgotten all he ever learnt of them, and does not care to say so.
The Sicilian, however, no matter how uneducated he may be, has an
appetite for romance which must be gratified and, as it would give him
some trouble to brush up his early accomplishments and stay at home
reading Pulci and Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto, he prefers to follow the
story of Carlo Magno and his paladins and the wars against the Saracens
in the teatrino. Besides, no Sicilian man ever stays at home to do
anything except to eat and sleep, and those are things he does out of
doors as often as not; the houses are for the women, the men live in the
street. It is as though in England the cab-drivers, railway porters and
shop-boys were to spend evening after evening, month after month, looking
on at a dramatized version of the _Arcadia_ or _The Faerie Queene_.

Presently the curtain went up and disclosed two flaring gas-jets, each
with a small screen in front of it about halfway down the stage; these
were the footlights, and behind them was a back cloth representing a hall
with a vista of columns. In the rather confined space between the
footlights and the back cloth there came on a knight in armour. He stood
motionless, supporting his forehead with his right fist, the back of his
hand being outward.

"Is he crying?" I inquired.

"No," replied the professor, "he is meditating; if he were crying the
back of his hand would be against his face."

He then dropped his fist and delivered a soliloquy, no doubt embodying
the result of his meditation, after which he was joined by his twin
brother. They conversed at length of battles and the King of Athens, of
Adrianopoli and the Grand Turk,