nce of S. Giuseppe had already been at work four years, but
Peppino's father still remained obstinately unilluminated.

Carmelo brought the tea and set a chair for Ricuzzu, who has his own
private meals like other babies but likes to sit up to the table and
watch his father and mother having theirs, occasionally honouring their
repast by trying his famous six--or is it seven?--teeth upon a crust,
which he throws upon the ground when he has done with it. So we all four
sat together in the shade of the Japanese medlar-tree and talked about
the changes in the town since my last visit.

First Peppino repeated something he had told me last time I was there,
before Ricuzzu was born. It was about the horror of that fatal night
when he heard his father crying in the dark; he went to his parents' room
to find out what was the matter, and heard the old man babbling of being
lost on Etna, wandering naked in the snow. Peppino struck a light, which
woke his father from his dream, but it did not wake his mother. She had
been lying for hours dead by her husband's side.

When the body was laid out and the watchers were praying by it at night,
the widower sat in a chair singing. He was not in the room with the
body, he had his own room, and his song was unlike anything Peppino had
ever heard; it had no words, no rhythm, no beginning and no end, yet it
was not moaning, it was a cantilena of real notes. It seemed to be a
comfort to him in his grief to pour these lamenting sounds out of his
broken heart. All the town came to the funeral, for the family is held
in much respect, and there were innumerable letters of condolence and
wreaths of flowers. When it was over, Peppino wrote a paragraph which
appeared in the _Corriere di Castellinaria_:

A tutte le pie cortesi persone che con assistenza, con scritti, con
l'intervento ai funebri della cara sventurata estinta, con adornarne
di fiori l'ultima manifestazione terrena desiderarono renderne meno
acre it dolore, ringraziamenti vivissimi porge la famiglia PAMPALONE.

He showed me this and waited while I copied it. When I had finished he
went on, talking more to himself than to me:

"The life it is not the same when we are wanting someone to be here that
is gone away. When we were young and this person was living, things it
was so; now we can understand this person who is gone, and things it is
other. This is not a good thing. Now is the time this dear person
sh