ed what I should do if at Hastings or Grimsby or Newlyn I
wanted to get inside a fisherman's cottage, and it occurred to me that I
should consult the parson. I knew a priest at Trapani whose acquaintance
I had made at Custonaci, but I did not know where he was. I boldly
stopped a couple of strange priests in the street and asked if they knew
my priest; they did, and one of them took me to his house. It was rather
mean of me to call upon him merely to ask him to help me to find a
Nascita, I ought to have wanted to salute him and enjoy his company; but
he did not appear to think it rude, and we went together to the old part
of the town where the sailors live and asked at a house where he knew
they always used to make a Nascita, but this year there was none. They
told us of another likely house, but again we were disappointed. We
tried several more without success, and at last I exclaimed:

"What a lack of faith!"

But my priest replied that that was not the explanation; it was lack of
money, because these things cannot be made for nothing.

We could not then call at more houses because he was busy with his own
affairs; it was his dinner-time, or he had to go to a wedding or a
funeral or to do whatever it is that Trapanese priests do in the
afternoon, so we postponed our search till the evening, when he returned
with his brother, another priest, who knew a family who had made a
Nascita, and we went to their house.

We were shown into a large room, at the end of which, on a long table,
was a sort of rabbit hutch or doll's house, all on one floor, about
eighteen inches high, with the front off showing that it was divided into
eight square compartments, so that the whole hutch was about twelve feet
long, the width of the room. These compartments were the rooms of
Joachim's house or flat, as we should say, and the figures in them were
about eight inches high. In the arts actual size counts for little and,
as with the marionettes, I soon accepted the dolls as representatives of
men and women and felt as though I were present at some such family
festival as Ignazio's wedding, and the rooms, all leading one into the
other, contributed to the illusion.

We were asked to begin with the entrance. The front part of it had been
let to a cobbler who was sitting at his bench mending a shoe, and if it
had been real life he would have been singing. Behind him was a garden
of artificial flowers with a fountain of real water th