lied: "I wish I were a Sicilian
buffo."

"Ah! but you could not be that," said he. "Now I could have my hair cut
short, grow a beard on my chin, a pair of spectacles on my eyes and heels
on my boots and then I should only have to be naturalised. But you could
never be a buffo--not even an English one."

"No; I suppose not. You see, I'm too serious. Gildo says I take a
gloomy view of life."

"Yes," he agreed, "why do you?"

"I don't know," I replied. "My poor mother--my adorata mamma, as you
call her--used to make the same complaint. She thought I inherited my
desponding temperament from my father."

"As you inherited your taste in dress from her."

"Just so. But I think I am like Orlando and your other paladins, and
that I am as I am because it was the will of heaven."

"That is only another way of saying the same thing," observed the buffo;
which rather surprised me because I did not know he took such a just view
of the significance of evolution.

On arriving at Catania we went to the albergo and, instead of following
the usual course and giving his Christian name and surname, Alessandro
Greco, he preferred to specify his profession and describe himself as
"Tenore Greco." They posted this up in the hall under my name, with the
unexpected result that the other guests ignored him, thinking the words
applied to me and that I was a tenor singer from Greece.

The first thing to be done was to go out and get something to eat, and as
we went along the buffo expressed his delight with the appearance of
Catania. He had no idea that such a town could exist outside Palermo or
Brazil.

"It is beautiful," he exclaimed, "yes, and I shall always declare that it
is beautiful. But, my dear Enrico, will you be kind enough to tell me
why it is so black?"

"That, my dear Buffo," I replied, "is on account of the lava."

"But how do you mean--the lava? What is this lava that you speak of, and
how does it darken the houses and the streets?"

To which I replied as follows: "The lava is that mass of fire which
issues from Etna and then dissolves itself and becomes formed into black
rock, and, as it is excessively hard, the people of Catania use it for
building their houses and for paving their streets."

I do not remember expressing myself precisely in these words, but the
buffo wrote me an account of his holiday and this is what he says I said.
It seems that I continued thus:

"This house, for example, is built o