an all the
pictures he has finished because it is so full of hope."

"Bravo, Buffo. And where is the miser?"

"Oh Caspita!" he exclaimed. "How clever you are! Of course there must
be a miser. We will make him at once."

So we selected an old man marionette who happened to have nothing
particular to do at the moment, and got a piece of sacking out of which
we made a bag and filled it--not with gold--

"No," said the buffo, "that must be one of the things the people do not
see, they must imagine the gold." Then we loaded the miser with his bag
and added him to the crowd of fugitives.

And he had made a woman saving a mouse-trap; she was a suffragette. That
was because he had read in the _Giornale di Sicilia_ that in England a
meeting of suffragettes had been dispersed by letting mice in among them.
The buffo's suffragette had argued thus:

"In all the world there are mice; Montalbano will be no exception. How
do I know what sort of house I shall have there? It will probably be
over-run with mice. If I take this trap with me, at least I shall be
able to catch some of them."

It turned out that she had to sleep on the floor in someone else's house
like a fugitive from Messina, and the mouse-trap came in very handy.

And he had made a chemist who was saving a medicine chest and a few
instruments. The chemist had argued thus:

"In Montalbano there will be no order. Here in Paris the restaurants are
well-managed and the food is good. How can I tell what sort of food they
will give us there? Very likely we shall have to depend a great deal
upon chance. I will take these instruments and medicine and earn money
by curing those who will be sure to be upset by the badness of the food."

And a man came weeping; his father had died the day before and there had
not been time to bury the body, but it had been put into a coffin and the
undertaker's men were laughing because the son was rich and had promised
to pay them extra for carrying the body to Montalbano and burying it
there; but the son did not see they were laughing, he was in front to
show them the way.

Two boys came along, each saving a marionette, one had Orlando, the other
Rinaldo; they forgot that they were escaping and stopped to make the
paladins fight; a third boy came and said they were his marionettes and
the others had stolen them, and the boys left Orlando and Rinaldo lying
on the stage and began to fight among themselves till their three m