otice,
so we had time for a walk round. The afternoon breeze was conducting a
symphony of perfumes, and, as we strolled among the blossoms that were
the orchestra, we could identify the part played by each flower;
sometimes one became more prominent, sometimes another, but always
through the changing harmonies we could distinguish the stately canto
fermo of the roses, counterpointed with a florid rhythm from the zagara.
If Flaubert had been writing in Sicilian, he could have said "una corona
di zagara," or, in English, "a wreath of orange-blossoms," and he need
not have worried himself to death by trying to elude the recurrent "de"
of "une couronne de fleurs d'oranger." There was also music of another
kind coming from a passero solitario (the blue rock thrush) who was
hanging in a cage in a doorway. We spoke to him, and he could not have
made more fuss about us if we had been the King of Italy and the Pope of
Rome paying him a visit.

I said, "Aren't you pleased with your beautiful garden, Peppino?"

He replied, "Yes, and other things too. Sometimes I am cross with my
life; but I think of Brancaccia and the baby, and I look around me, and
then I says to myself, 'Ah, well, never mind! Be a good boy!'"

Presently we came to a fountain which, when I turned a tap, twisted round
and round, spouting out graceful, moving curves, and the drops fell in
the basin below and disturbed the rose-leaves that were sleeping on the
water. I also found an image of the Madonna and Bambino in a corner,
with an inscription in front promising forty days' indulgence to anyone
who should recite devoutly an Ave before it. I understood this as well
as one who is not a Roman Catholic can be said to understand such a
promise, and better than I understood another image to which Peppino
called my attention. It was a small coloured crockery S. Giuseppe,
standing on the top of the wall and looking into the garden, protected by
a couple of tiles arranged over him as an inverted V, and held in place
by dabs of mortar.

I said, "Why do you keep your patron saint on the wall like that?"

He replied that it had nothing to do with him. The land over the wall
belongs to the monks, and they put the saint up to gaze into the garden
in the hope that Peppino's father might thereby become gradually
illuminated with the idea of giving them a piece of his land; they wanted
it to join to their own, which is rather an awkward shape just there.
The influe