j^iMiiMj THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN BY-PATHS IN SICILY -' \^ i ^ V M t T m ^ IM N "Roast Sheep!" BY-PATHS IN SICILY BY ELIZA PUTNAM HEATON Scatter now some bright Praise for the island which Zeus, the Lord of Olympus, gave to Persephone, and confirmed to her by shaking his locks, that he uiould support prosperous Sicily, fairest spot of the fruitful earth, by the wealthy excellence of cities. — First Nemean Ode of Pindar. NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 68 1 Fifth Avenue Copyright 1 9 20 By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of Amerira PREFACE Eliza Osborn Putnam was born in Danvers, Mass., a descendant of families long native to that region. Her education, begun in Danvers and Salem schools, and furthered by graduation in Boston University, where she was an honor student in the classic tongues, well fitted her for a writer's career. After her marriage and removal to New York, Mrs. Heaton began newspaper work, in which she swiftly gained such success as was possible at a time when women in that profession were still few and looked upon as experimental; serving first as special writer and afterward as a managing editor in newspaper and syndicate offices, until failing health made arduous tasks impossible. Marooned in Sicily by ill health a dozen years ago, the author turned for occupation to the study of peasant life, a study eagerly pursued until it was cut short by her death. Of that work the present volume can fairly be presented as com- pleted. CONTENTS Introduction i . vii PART I THE OLD MAGIC CHAPTER PAGE I. Elflocks and Love Charms .... 3 II. Donna Pruvidenza's Lemon .... 34 III. Cola Pesce 66 IV. The Cleft Oak 96 V. The Hairy Hand 116 VI. Jesus as Destroyer 137 PART II FAIRS AND FESTIVALS I. Christmas 159 11. Troina Fair 178 III. St. Philip the Black 203 IV. The Miracles of Sant' Alfio . . . 228 V. The Car of Mary at Randazzo . . 261 VI. "Red Pelts" at Castrogiovanni . . 281 vii viii CONTENTS PART in ISLAND YESTERDAYS CHAPTER PAGE I. Etna in Anger 297 11. Messina Six Months After . . . .312 in. In the Sulphur Mines 327 IV. Hearth, Distaff and Loom . . . .339 V. Speed the Plow 352 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "Roast Sheep" Frontispiece FACING PAGE The Flax Worker ..3 Elf Locks 16 Door Charms for Evil Eye . . . . .48 Catania Boats Have Eyes 67 Lobster Pots and Fish Traps 85 The San Pancrazio 85 The Little Oak Tree 109 The Piper 163 Going to the Fair 195 Hotel at Troina 195 A Herdsman 195 Girls and Pigs 195 "Most Becoming" ....... 195 The "American" Cart, and Detail Showing Llncoln 248 A Straw Hut 263 Tying the Boys in Place, and Detail of the Car 272 "White Wings" 292 Gossips at Castrogiovanni 292 A Pig Pillow 292 The Laundry 292 Driven by the Lava 305 Fruit Trees for Fuel 305 Ruined by Etna 305 ix X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FAOMG PAGE How THE Lava Advances 310 A Useless Vigil 310 Queen Elena's Village 318 "Kitchenette," American Village . . .318 Miners at Villarossa 329 "Carusi" 337 Child Labor 337 The Little Sulphur Miners 337 Gna Tidda's Loom 341 A Sicilian Kitchen 345 Plowman Homeward Bound 353 Threshing 355 The "American Houses" 358 More Houses of Returned Emigrants . . 358 Pictures Made for "Babbo in America" . . 363 INTRODUCTION The author of this book was able to act in Messina after the earthquake as an occasional in- terpreter between Italian ofificers from the North and the local peasants. This odd situation may illustrate the difficulties that dialects threw in the way of her study of Sicilian customs and her suc- cess in mastering them. But the gift of tongues was not the only qualification for the task by which intimate acquaintance with the chosen field enabled her to profit. Of the 700 local dialects of Italy, those used in Sicily have a family resemblance. All draw more largely than those of North Italy upon Greek, Saracen and Spanish sources. Such skill in comparative philology as the author pos- sessed, from Sanscrit down to the modern Latin languages, was a key to them all. A better key to confidences and frank speech was her neighborly sympathy. Probably there were few regions in Sicily where she did not gain true friends among the unlettered, as well as among savants and anti- quarians. Beginning her work with no plan beyond solacing xii INTRODUCTION an Invalid's leisure by the production of a book of tourist observations, Mrs. Heaton delved Into the mass of material presented by the survival of old beliefs upon a soil largely pagan; by picturesque custom and poetic observance; by peasant steadfast- ness through centuries and the recent swift effect of new-world migration, until her projects widened to embrace several volumes. To these a capstone should have been set by describing the debt of the United States to the industry of the Sicilians, and the benefit Sicily in turn derives from the home- coming emigrant. Her study of island thought and work as affected by the "Americani" might have helped to make the industrious children of the sun better understood in the country which Is enriched by their labors. For this task much material was gathered and many hundred photographs taken of intimate Sicilian life. This remains material only. The author's projected study of the reaction of the old world to the new, through sea migrations more vast and more fruitful of change than were the Crusades, was interrupted by the war. She was one of those Americans who, protesting, were ordered home by Secretary Bryan in the early days of the great con- flict; her health did not permit her to offer her services in war work, so that her observations upon a theme so deeply affected by the past five years would require rewriting from fresh Inquiry, and must be counted lost. INTRODUCTION xiii Nine chapters of this book were completed by the author. Those upon the August festival in Randazzo and the fairs of Troina and Castro- giovanni were finished from rough drafts. The account of the sulphur mines, of the Etna eruptions in 19 10 and of Messina after the earthquake, are made up from letters home. Two remaining chapters of Part III were put together from notes and material left in unfinished form. The manner of a work thus gathered varies, from the fanciful treatment of "Donna Pruvidenza's Lemon" and "Jesus the Destroyer" to the more soberly descrip- tive later pages. Nor can a volume so compiled be wholly free from errors, which an author's re- vision would have corrected. A very small part of the rhymes, invocations, charms and " 'razioni" noted down by Mrs. Heaton in all manner of difficult circumstances, and at much cost of labor and discomfort, are printed in foot- notes. These passages, with examples of familiar speech in the text, will furnish material for com- parison with literary Italian to those acquainted with the most beautiful of all languages. The Sicilian dialects do not differ so competely as to bar speech between provinces, as sometimes happens in the mainland. The doubling of initial consonants and the substitution of "g" and "d" for "1," and of "u" for "o," are the peculiarities most striking to the visitor. Thus ''beautiful daughter" — if one could be supposed to tempt the xiv INTRODUCTION evil eye by such a compliment — is "bedda figghia," not "bella filia." Anello (ring) is "aneddu"; castello (castle), "casteddu"; Mongibello (Etna), "Mungibeddu." "B" is frequently softened to "v," as in modern Greek. Spanish influence is noted in many words; and diminutives and nicknames are universal, applied as freely to tourists as to natives, perhaps not al- ways with their knowledge. For an American matron of years and presence to be addressed as Dear Little Missy, "Cara Signurinedda," is a com- pliment of friendship. Naturally, Greek words appear, as in "cona" (icon), a sacred picture or statue; and there are places, like the ever memorable Plain of the Greeks of Garibaldi's heroes, where more than a little Greek is still spoken. Words of Arab or Saracen origin are common in place names, in the names of winds, of tools, of articles of ancient and com- mon barter. Nearly all the illustrations of the book are from photographs taken by the author, or from those made under her direction by Francesco Galifi, of Taormina. On her behalf it is proper to offer thanks to many who furthered her work by aid or encouraged it by interest; to the memory of the learned Dr. Pitre; to the Advocate Lo Vetere and the Deputies Colaianni and De Felice; to Mrs. George H. Camehl, of Buffalo; the American-born Signora Baldasseroni, of Rome; the British-born INTRODUCTION xv Signora Caico, of Monte d'Oro, and Miss Hill, of Taormina; to the courteous American Consular representatives; to a hundred Sicilians of humble station in life, many of them known to the editor only by nicknames; last and most, to the Signorina Licciardelli ("Nina Matteucci") ; her brother, Major Licciardelli, and their family, in Taormina and Catania. J. L. H. PART I THE OLD MAGIC The Flax Worker CHAPTER I Elf-locks and Love Charms Amusing and caressing him (the babe in the cradle) they (the "Donne di fuora") sometimes touch his hair and mat it into a Httle lock not to be tangled, which goes by the name of woman's tress, "plica polonica." This tress is the sign of the protection under which the baby has been taken, and constitutes its good fortune, as well as that of its family. No one ever dares to cut it; certain, in case it should be cut, of incurring the wrath of the Signore, who would visit on the child cross-eyes, or a wry neck, or spinal weakness. — Pitri. It was early twilight of a bleak day at the end of December when I first saw Vanna, the Grass- hopper-eater. I had left Giardini while purple clouds still scudded across the golden sky, and the smoke of Etna flamed in the sunset. In the cold hill shadows as I climbed the old road to Taormina the wind from the sea bit sharply, and the first brave clusters of almond blossoms shivered, pinkish-gray against bare gray-brown branches. There passed me a couple of men muffled in shawls, their long cane poles bearing witness that they had been beating olives from the trees; then I was alone until at a sudden turn I came upon a group of women knitting and gossiping as they 3 4 BY-PATHS IN SICILY toiled up the bare lime-rock way, so hard at the surface, so soft and rutted where the crust has worn through. "A-a-a-a-ah !" twanged one of them to an ass that snatched a hasty bite at the side of the path and then lurched ahead, its saddle-sacks bulging with the squeezed skins of lemons. "A-a-a-a-ah !" The woman repeated the nasal call. But the ass refused to quicken its pace, swing- ing now right, now left, in the zig-zag track from step to step across the path where countless gen- erations of mules and asses have trodden foot-holes and helped the rain to scoop channels. Three hens that clung to the animal's back, their wings flopping nervously every time it heaved up a shoulder, so absorbed my attention that I started when a voice said, "Good-evening, your ladyship!" An old woman had detached herself from the group and was waiting for me, lowering from her head to the wall a great bundle she had been carry- ing. "All sole alone?" she queried, looking curi- ously at me out of faded yellow-gray eyes that yet were the brightest I had ever seen. In a country where shop girls still hesitate to go to and from work unchaperoned, a woman who walks by herself outside of her village is an object of scrutiny. "Are there wolves?" I responded. The old woman grinned comprehension. "The way is safe. Are we Christians, or are we not?" ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 5 she answered. "I have failed hi my duty ! I should have knov^n that Vossia (Your Ladyship) under- stands her own affairs. But," she added, "I do not persuade myself that Vossia ought to make the road alone at this hour." "My daughter, I am not alone," I said; "am I not with you?" "Va be! Rest then a minute, and we will make the road together." She was lean as a grasshopper but erect, and her cheeks, though sunken, showed a wholesome red. She had no visible teeth and her chin curved up toward her nose. She was barefooted, and her skirt, in faded checks of black and red, was pulled up at one side under the string of her blue apron. A yellow kerchief was tied over her head and another in pink and white covered her shoulders. "Softly! The way is bad," she warned me, as presently we started forward. "The way indeed is bad," I replied; and then almost I lost consciousness of her presence in the monotonous rhythm of the prayer she began to wail : St. Nicola, send away this gale; Sant' Andrea, beyond our pale! I walk with Mary, I walk the way; In the name of God and of Christ I pray Let wind touch me not as I walk this day. The cracked voice went on and on. When it came at last to a stop I perceived that with Sicilian 6 BY-PATHS IN SICILY facility of rhyme she had finished her song with a twist in my direction: Joseph, Mary and our Lord, Give me health along the road; For Vossia's sake this prayer I say, May she meet good people by the way. "How are you called?" I asked abruptly. "Vanna," she answered, naming also her three daughters-in-law. " The Grasshopper-eater !' " I exclaimed, a nick- name that I had heard coming suddenly to memory. "First the nickname, then the name!" she re- turned, good-humoredly. "And Vossia is the American who talks as we others talk." "You may use my nickname, if you like," I apologized. "It suffices to say 'the little American,* " she re- sponded, politely. Thus completely introduced, we gossiped about our families until we came to the roadside altar that stands at the last turn in the way from which one looks back on Giardini. Here under the carob tree Vanna paused. Untying the mouth of her heavy bag, she took out a tight little bunch of the red carnations that are called "cobblers' flowers" and set them on the ledge of the picture in a rusty tin that once had held tunny fish in oil. Then she signed herself, kissing her fingers to the Mother and Child. ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 7 I had long been curious about this unbeautiful Madonna, at once neglected and revered. Old red paint shows behind the harsh blue of the altarino's broken masonry. Mary's face is long-nosed and anxious and her hands are as huge and clumsy as the baby's legs. Neither sun nor rain can soften the stark green» and yellows of the icon ; yet offer- ings never fail of flowers, fading without water. "Is she perhaps miraculous," I inquired; "this Madonna?" "Yes," said Vanna, with a short positive nod; adding after a pause: "I make a novena to her for the return of my son from America." "She will bring him?" "Once before when I made it he came and stayed a year." She retwisted the cloth that made a pad for her head, and bent while I lifted the great sack to its place on this "corona." As we resumed the way she said: "One rests well here, for Vossia knows it was here the Madonnuzza rested when she came to Taormina fleeing the Saracens." The Madonna is seen so frequently at Taormina even to-day, in the visions of the old, that I asked, without surprise, even as to the Saracens: "And St. Joseph, did he rest here also?" Vanna looked full at me with her quick, quiet eyes that shone like a cat's with yellow. "No," she said. "The Madonnuzza sat on the wall and gave the feeding bottle to the Bambineddu while 8 BY-PATHS IN SICILY San Giuseppe took his stick and went to find a hiding place." Vanna's active step became that of a bent old man trudging uphill leaning on a staff. "He went up past Taormina," she said, "until he came to the grotto where is now the church " We looked up, but the rock under the Castle of Taormina where stands the hermitage of the Madonna della Rocca was not in view. -^ "When San Giusipuzzu had found the grotto, he hurried back to the Madonna and the Bambinu, for the Saracens were coming, *Pum! Po! Pum! Po!'" Here the Patriarch's feeble step was changed to that of a tramping host as my companion continued to stamp, "Pum! Po! Pum! Po!" St. Joseph and the Madonna climbed as fast as they could, but the Saracens climbed faster; so they turned aside into a wood of lupines but the lupines rattled their pods and made such a clatter that the Madonna did not dare to stop, though she was tired and the Bambineddu kept crying. Vanna twisted her mobile old face and began to whimper like a fretted baby; stopping to say: "So the Madonna cursed the lupines, saying, 'May your hearts be as bitter as my grief,' " And Vossia knows how bitter are the lupines; one soaks them long before eating. "They hurried through the lupines and came to a field of rye, but the rye refused to close behind ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 9 them. It bent as they passed and would not spring up again, but left a track for the Saracens to see. The Bambineddu kept crying, and the Madonna cursed the rye. It is for this that bread made of it is not satisfying. "The Saracens were close behind, coming Pum! Po! Pum! Po! So they hurried through the rye and came to a field of wheat. The good wheat closed well behind them and made no noise, and the Madonna blessed it, and they rested, and the Bambineddu went to sleep with its face in the Madonnuzza's neck. "By and by they went into a vineyard, and the vines arched over them and twisted their tendrils and made a shelter like a straw hut; and there they stayed till it was dark, for the Madonna said: 'I can no more!' When it was night they went up to the grotto. Thus it was, Vossia." "Did the Madonna stay long at the grotto?" I inquired. "Yes; one day in a thunderstorm there came into the grotto a little girl who was minding two Iambs, and the Madonna said to her: 'Pretty little girl, go down to Taormina and tell the archpriest to come up here.' "The little girl said: *I can't go; I must tend my lambs.' " T'U tend them for you,' said the Madonna. "So the little girl went. The archpriest came lo BY-PATHS IN SICILY up to the grotto and the Madonna said to him: 'Excellency, I wish a church built here.' "The archpriest answered: 'There is too much rock.' "But the Madonna said: 'The rock will break away of itself.' "The archpriest called the master masons, and the minute they went to work the rock did break away of its own accord. They built the church that Vossia has seen, but the grotto itself they did not disturb. These are things of God, Vossia; no one knows them but me," Vanna looked at me again with her calm, shining yellow eyes. She set the tip of her forefinger against her forehead, repeating with deliberation: "I tell these things of God to Vossia; there is no one else who knows them." It is true that the flight into Egypt through Taormina is known to no one but Gna Vanna; but the legend of the plants that hid and that re- fused to hide the Virgin is old Italian. A's to the sanctuary of the Madonna della Rocca, there are those in Taormina who say that it was a boy, not a girl, who entered the grotto, and that he saw a beautiful woman spinning. Frightened, he ran away and told the story. The people who came to look found, indeed, no woman; but, instead, a miraculous picture of the Mother and Child. In the gathering dusk we met fishermen coming down the hill to the sea for their evening's work, ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS ii and there passed us a scrap of a boy driving a little Sardinian donkey. The child had been to mill to get a tumulu of wheat ground, for his father had land, he said; and almond trees so tall you could not get the nuts without climbing a ladder. While he boasted sociably of this phenomenon and of the clean, shivering ass, newly clipped because it had been "too dirty," Vanna lapsed into a silence so unresponsive that, when the lad had bubbled "bb-b-bb-r-rr-r" to the ass and had left us, I asked if the great bag was tiring her. "No," she said, shortly, straightening herself and stepping out more smartly. Although she was old, she could work in the fields and carry burdens with the best of them. Of course the bag was heavy. In it there were chick peas, cauliflowers, lemons and chestnuts. Some of these things she had earned picking up olives as the men beat them from the trees, and others people had given her out of re- spect. It was fortunate that people did respect her and give her food, because her husband had a heart "like the claw of a devil fish"; he was so stingy he never gave her anything. In the bag there was food for several days, and her grand- children would be glad to see her coming. Of course it was heavy, but she could carry it, because the Madonna, St. John and the sainted souls of the beheaded bodies helped her. It was natural that she should be helped, because she was good. She worked, she brought food from the country, and 12 BY-PATHS IN SICILY she had no amusement except to stand in her door- way. The monologue ran along until a mysterious "they" aroused my curiosity. The respect and help on which she was enlarging seemed to involve other personages than the Madonna, St. John and the sainted souls of the beheaded bodies. "Who are 'they?' " I interrupted. She gave me no answer and continued to talk of her merits and their rewards. But it was not long before the flood of her own words swept her to revelation. Setting down her sack, she glanced quickly around and took off her head kerchief, replacing it instantly as a couple of women came in sight at the turn. "What long hair you have !" I exclaimed. I had had a momentary glimpse of grizzled braids, thin as a string, wound many times round and round her head and held in place by the knifelike blade of a silver dagger. "Si," she replied with finality, as if there were something I ought to understand. And suddenly there came to me a recollection of old men I had seen in mountain villages among whose scant, short locks there stood out long matted wisps of gray hair. Such "trizzi," tangled by elfin fingers while a baby lies in the cradle and never cut — how would one recognize them on a woman? Were Vanna's protectors those impish little sprites, half fairy, half witch, the Women of the Outside? ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 13 "You have 'the tresses?'" I inquired. "Si," she said, with short positiveness. She would tell me nothing more, for we had passed the chapel of the Madonna of the Mercies, and already we heard the stir of the village as we climbed the last long slope under the walls of Taormina. Some day she would show me her hair, she promised; but these were secret things not to be spoken of except when we were alone. Vanna the grasshopper-eater had just moved into my own street, and I marked the house she pointed out to me. But next morning when I passed it going to the Corso the door was shut, for Taormina was shivering at a temperature of not more than fifteen degrees above freezing, and the fiend was riding in the wind. It was not until New Year's Day that, noticing hens hopping casually across her threshold, I followed them inside. The room in which I found myself was so dark and smoke-grimed that in spite of the partly opened door I did not see at first that I had stumbled on a family gathering. Vanna's house has a window opening, but for economy of heat its wooden shutter was closed. Vanna and her daughter-in-law Rocca, a red-cheeked young woman, were making macaroni, and Vanna's greeting was more ready than cordial. Vanna's husband, too, was at home. He of the claws of the devil-fish proved to be a little half- blind old man whom I already knew as Domenico the dwarf. With a rusty long cap pulled down 14 BY-PATHS IN SICILY over his head, hairy sandals resting on the "conca" where perhaps a Httle warmth Hngered in the white ashes, chin bent on his two hands that nursed the top of a stick, he looked sunk in chilled misery. Ordered to kiss my hand, he yielded dumb obedience. Vanna set a chair, lifting from it a bundle of clothes wet from the wash, and wiping it with her apron while she shrilled "sciu! sciu!" to a lean brown fowl that flew upon the bed to get at the macaroni. A less enterprising bird was settled in a nest of rags and brush under the fireplace. "Do they lay well?" I asked. "They eat and do nothing!" scolded Vanna. "Uncle January sends us cold weather. The hens dirty the house," she added ; "but what can one do?" Let those criticise Vanna's housekeeping who have themselves kept house and reared live stock in one room. Beside the cold fireplace were heaped brambles and roots of cactus fig for the cooking fire. A disordered table, a long brown shelf against the rear wall and a chest at the foot of the bed held most of the family possessions. Behind the great bed and in the corners stood old baskets, boxes, water jars and tall coops made out of rush-woven fish-traps. A hen with a broken leg and a cock moped in these cages, and from some burrow in the litter appeared at moments dirty white rabbits. While Vanna railed at a peevish child that tumbled about on the floor, I studied the walls and their smoke-dimmed icons. The Madonna of the ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 15 Rock, the Madonna of the Chain, the Black Madonna of Tindaro, S. Pancrazio, Sant' Alfio and his brothers, S. Filippo the black, S. Francesco di Paola, S. Giovanni the beheaded, the sainted souls of the beheaded bodies I had not finished counting the Lares and Penates when Vanna found an interval of quiet in which to tell me how she had set the hen's leg, which "he" had broken with his stick. Furtively she thrust out towards her husband her first and fourth fingers in the sign of the horn, her gesture and the gleam in her pale bright eyes spelling warning. While she talked Vanna did not neglect the macaroni. Rocca held on her knees a board carrying a lump of dough, from which from minute to minute she pinched off bits. Rolling these between her hands, she passed the rolls one by one to Vanna, who sank into each a knitting needle and re-rolled the paste on the board to form the hole. Each short piece as she slipped it off the needle she hung to dry over the edge of a sieve that balanced on the rolled-up mattress at the foot of the bed. When enough for supper was ready she tied the rest of the dough In a kerchief and shut it into the chest, throwing the crumbs to the cock with a "chi-chi- richi! cu-cu-rucu!" This work finished, Vanna picked up the dark mite of a child and began crooning, "ninna, nan- na " interrupting herself to kiss the tear- blurred face. "Pretty boy ! He has fifteen months, i6 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Vossia. His grandma's wee one! Ninna, ninna, nanna " The brown eyes shut, and after a minute Rocca carried the baby away, his shaven head drooping over her arm. I was rising to follow when old MIcciu, who beyond grunting once or twice, *T am not content !" had sat hunched in his chair seemingly oblivious of his surroundings, struggled to his feet. Vanna repeated the sign of the horn, forming with her lips the words, "Zu Nuddu is going out" ; and, in fact, "Uncle Nobody," picking up his shoulder bags of black and white wool, scuffed to- ward the door. "An accident to you!" exclaimed Vanna. "Eccu!" she said, with satisfaction, as the door closed behind the old man. Left alone with me, she took off her kerchief after some urging, displaying again her fleshless head, where the skin clung to the scalp like parchment. Gold hoops hung in her ears, and wound in rings like a mat around the back of her skull were griz- zled strings of hair. Pulling out the pins, she let down this mass, undoing with her fingers the upper part of two braids and releasing a scanty lot of gray old woman's hair that hung loose and ragged to her shoulders. Starting from this short mane and falling to Vanna's feet, even lying on the floor, dropped two dark tails that, felted with dust, had more the look Elf Locks ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 17 of strands of sheep's wool than of what they were in fact, matted locks of her own hair. "Eccu!" she repeated. These tails were the "trizzi." Never cut, never combed, treated with the respectful neglect which is their proper care, they marked Gna Vanna as a person living under a spell; the protegee from birth of the mysterious "women of the outside," or "women of the house" — the little "ladies" who have many names. Her fearsome pixy locks set Vanna apart as one who, taught by witches, pos- sessed some at least of the seven faculties of the witch summed up in the jingle! She can embroil the peaceful moon and sun, Fly through the air fast as the wind doth run; Through closed doors she knoweth how to go, The man most strong she maketh weak and slow; She leadeth closest friends to fight with knives; Her will makes husband wrangle with their wives; She striketh men and women sore and lame, To have no rest and suffer cruel pain, Vanna's "Eccu!" was said with pride. She looked over her shoulder at the tails and then smil- ingly at me. "What would happen," I asked, "if they were cut?" "I should die." It is a number of years now since Vanna said this to me, and I am as confident to-day as I was then that she meant it. She believed and still be- i8 BY-PATHS IN SICILY lieves in the sanctity of her elf-locks, while fully realizing their value as an asset. "But if you combed them?" "Something would happen to me." With much dramatic gift the weird old creature told me how sometimes in the night she waked to see in her room twenty-four lovely little "women of the house," ladies and fairies. When the "ronni" appeared the whole room glowed with light. They wore bright, beautiful clothing and sometimes they sang. Sometimes they talked in tiny little voices, but mostly they were mute. Sometimes they played games. One of their favorite tricks was to pitch "the old man," whom they did not like, out of bed. Once when "the old man" would give her nothing to eat they showed her the key of the box where he kept bread and wine. Sometimes they caressed her hair and made new tresses. Lifting her gray locks she pointed out little curls against her neck, sacred like the tresses. But even she was not safe from their anger. Sometimes, if she went bare-footed, they gave her beatings be- cause they insist on cleanliness. She pulled up her skirts to show her white, well-kept flesh. Oftenest of all they danced. I looked on dazed while Vanna the grasshopper- eater whirled around the room in a wild dance in imitation of the ronni, her brown, wrinkled face full of uncanny animation, yellow eyes glowing, ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 19 elf-locks swinging, her grotesque hops scaring the hen out of the nest under the fireplace. Not scanning details too closely, I did not doubt the good faith of words or actions, because I have long understood with what literal truth Pitre says that in certain environments we cannot listen to tales told in all honesty without remaining uncer- tain "whether these men and these women are a prey to continual visions, or whether we ourselves are dreaming with our eyes open." Rather through this woman so garrulous and so secretive, so simple and so shrewd, so vindictive and yet so kindly, so credulous and so positive, I seemed to catch glimpses of an obscure brain-life like that of a witch of the fifteenth century. Up to a certain point she would believe in herself and others would believe in her. Witches have always carried magic in their hair, and hence the foes of witches have cut it off. Sibilla herself was unkempt and her hair tangled like a horse's mane. I wondered if any trace attached to this skeleton- thin "Grasshopper-eater" of the evil eye fear ex- pressed in the saying: "A grasshopper has looked on thee." Ceasing her gyrations, Vanna put the cackling hen to the door and sank out of breath on the dark old chest, bringing the warm egg and dropping it into my hands. While she coiled her hair once more around the dagger, she repeated her former self-congratulations that she could work, although ao BY-PATHS IN SICILY she was old, by the help of the ronni. "Because of their favor, too, people brought her gifts, de- siring her prayers." That very morning she had received the unhappy cock in the fish-trap and two rotoli of flour to make pasta for the New Year. These things were fortunate, because she had no one but the ronni to provide for her. 'T am an orphan," she concluded; "I have no father, mother I have none. I have no one. I must live. Do I speak well?" She replied to her own query with a complacent nod. Knowing what sorts of prayers are in request from reputed "wise women," I suggested: "People ask your 'razioni against witchcraft?" "Si," she answered. Only a few days before a woman had sent for her whose bread had come out of the oven full of ugly bubbles and "twisted as if it had been struck by lightning." Even a blind woman must have seen that this was the work of evil eyes. She had not used oil, salt or incense, but she had said a prayer: Four loaves and four fishes, Away forever with ill wishes ! God is moon and God is sun, Harm this bread there can no one. Christ Jesus died, Christ Jesus rose, Out of this oven malocchio goes ! Next morning the woman baked sixteen loaves and they came out as beautiful as bread could be. ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 21 She cut a big piece and gave it to Vanna to eat, all hot as it was, seasoned with oil and garlic. "These are things of God, Vossia," Vanna con- tinued. "The priests speak against these 'razioni, but they themselves cannot help the people. What do priests do but say the mass and eat and sleep? If people want help they must come to me; there- fore they respect me. I cannot read prayers out of a book, but I have many written in my mind. Always for good, never for evil, are they. Loose? yes; bind? No! Are we Christians or are we not? Vossia is persuaded?" Relieving me of the egg, she lifted the lid of the chest as if to put it away; questioning as she did so. "In Vossia's country hens make themselves by machine; it is true?" "By machine ?" I repeated. "Si ; one of my sons brought home from America a machine for making chickens; but the hens make them better. He lost everything, and now he has not pennies to go again." Taking out of the chest two or three other eggs, she pressed them all on me, saying: "They do not give to eat to Vossia such eggs as these, eggs of the house, all made to-day." A suspicion that Vanna meant to save herself from bare feet and beatings by enlisting me as a respectful giver of shoes grew larger in my mind, but fortunately I concealed it. To me, at least. 22 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Vanna has always been a friend more disinterested than a ronna. To cover my uncertainty I picked up a strip of faded silk that lay on a pile of stuff in the open chest ; it proved to be a man's necktie knitted in pink, through which ran a line of black embroidered lettering. "What does it say?" demanded Vanna. I read to her. It was in correct Italian: *T love thee, thee always have I loved, thou wert the first." "To wear at festas the poor thing gave it to him!" exclaimed Vanna. "Who is he?" I demanded, scenting a story. Vanna took out of the chest a pair of coarse blue socks and two or three men's kerchiefs. These things she turned over for some time on her knees before she brought herself to the point of telling me that they belonged to a young man called Peppino who had refused to marry the girl to whom he was promised, on the ground that his mother objected, and that the poor girl's father was threatening to kill her. The girl's mother, who lived not far away, had sent for Vanna the day before, and had asked her to make a "recall" of the youth to the girl he had abandoned. I fingered the pink necktie with fresh interest. "You are going to do it?" I questioned. Vanna said she didn't know. The poor girl cried all day long ; it broke one's heart to hear her. She would gladly do something to bring the mother ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 23 to such a good will that she would say to her son: "Take her." But never had she heard of such a hard-hearted mother-in-law. And they had not given her money enough to buy candles. To make the recall she must light seven candles every night for nine nights in succession, and if anything went wrong, she must begin again at the beginning. Every candle cost half a lira, so that she ought to have at least nine lire. At this point the door opened and Rocca entered with a little girl, perhaps four years old. Glancing at us curiously, she demanded: "What do you talk about so long?" "Things of God," replied Vanna, shutting the chest and warning me with a glance of her quiet shining eyes. "I tell Vossia things of God of which she may think in these days of rain when she must stay indoors." Rocca snorted good-humoredly. Bidden to wish me "good-evening," the child, as I rose to go, proffered a timid "buona sera." "Listen to her !" cried Vanna delightedly. "She says 'buona sera!' instead of 'buna sira' like we others. That comes of going to school !" The brown little curly-head was made to speak a piece: Giovannina is my name; I am not pretty nor too plain, I do not know how it can be That everybody's so good to me. 24 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "Beautiful, eh?" cried the proud grandmother, fishing a soldo out of the big pocket that hung at her waist. "Beautifully she speaks! Run, buy a biscotto !" It was some days before I again saw Vanna, and I might never have known more of the poor "zita" at Santa Venera, if I had not chanced to pass her door one afternoon just as she was inserting the key. A little book that I carried caught her atten- tion. Taking it from me as she invited me indoors, she turned the pages with interest, putting on spec- tacles to see the better. Finally, giving it back to me, she asked: "What does it say?" The book happened to be an Italian version of the old Sicilian Greek, Theocritus, and it opened to the page I had been reading. I turned into the vernacular what Andrew Lang has better phrased: "As turns this brazen wheel, so, restless imder Aphrodite's spell, may he turn and turn about my door ! My magic wheel, draw home to me the man Hove!" Vanna looked puzzled. She asked: "Is it a book of prayers? There was a lame man who lived above Giarre who had an ancient book of 'razioni. He is dead now, but to all who went to him for help he would read out of his book. I cannot read, I have no book, but in my head I have many 'razioni. What more does it say, Vossia?" I began the second idyl, but when I had reached ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 25 the words, "Wreathe the bowl with bright-red wool, that I may knit the witchknots against my grievous lover, who for twelve days — oh, cruel ! — has never come hither " she interrupted, exclaiming: "It is a love prayer !" "Yes," I admitted; "is it like the one you were going to say for the poor deserted girl at Santa Venera?" "Mine is more better," she boasted. It may have been the wish to prove that the prayers in her head were "more better" than those written in my book that procured me a matinee re- hearsal of the charms she was saying nightly for the abandoned sweetheart. For she had reached the middle of the novena. The difficulty about candle money had somehow been overcome. Opening the chest, she took out Peppino's socks, necktie and kerchiefs. "The wool must be white," she said, going to a sheepskin that hung from a nail on the wall, and pulling off some flocks. Be- fore proceeding, she fastened the door. The "recall" could not be made, she said, except when the moon was waxing and on a night when the stars were bright. The first step was to light seven candles. She nodded towards the table, where seven spots betrayed that seven drops of melted tallow served as candle bases. Then, taking the wool, she carded hastily a little, using a hand con- trivance supported on a chair. Next, spinning a thread with the distaff, she braided a cord of three 26 BY-PATHS IN SICILY strands, explaining that if this "lacciu" — lassoo or noose — were made just the length of Peppino, that would add to its virtue. Taking the cord in her hands, she tied in it three knots while reciting as fast as her tongue could run : Peppino, two are they that watch thee; Of them that bind thee, ten there be. I bind and do not loose the knot Till what I wish from thee I've got. 'Tis thee I bind and thee I make Thy promised bride to wife to take. Laying down the knotted cord, Vanna put Pep- pino's kerchiefs on her head, piling above them the socks and necktie. Having thus put herself into communion with him, she rushed on: Peppino, I look at thee. Thou look'st at me. All things else out of mind must sink, Of pledged wife only must thou think. Dropping Peppino's property beside the cord, Vanna next took a little salt and stirred it with the forefinger of her left hand around and around in the palm of her right hand ; but before she could begin the new prayer I begged her not to gabble at such a speed. Glib recitation of formulas was no more essen- tial in ancient Roman sacrifice than it is to-day in Sicilian incantations. Unless a spell is said, fast and smoothly, without mistaking a syllable, it must ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 27 be repeated from the beginning. A trip is a bad omen. It results that no conjuror can get through her formula at all except at top speed. "Softly ! Softly !" I would entreat of Vanna. "I don't get half the words." Then she would break, stumble, begin again and in a minute rattle faster than before. While stirring the salt she said: Turn salt! Turn bread! Turn pine cone! Turn wood! Turn Peppino's head. All things else from his mind must sink, Of his sweetheart only must he think; For I hold true faith that come he must His troth to keep, for this is just. Opening the wooden shutter of the small window and looking up, Vanna said that the next 'razioni must be said while gazing at the moon: Vitu, dear saint of Mountain Royal, To you there comes your servant loyal; I come to you to ask a grace, As if kin we were of blood and race. It is your dogs that you must lend ; To hunt Pippinu you must them send. The beast so savage that has eyes. Like a butcher's dog "A-a-a!" that cries. Let him seize Pippinu by the hair E'en to his pledged wife's door to bear. With no woman may he speak, No man's counsel may he seek. 28 BY-PATHS IN SICILY In thee I trust, strong is my hope To hear dogs bark, bells ring, doors ope. Saint Devil, concede me what I wish. I will not respect you as Devil, if you do not concede me what I wish. I will respect you as Devil, when you concede me what I wish. With a face as placid as if she were knitting a stocking Vanna concluded this invocation. Then, dropping on her knees at the window, and surveying the heavens as if she were choosing a star, she declaimed : Shining star, powerful star, Heedless of me still you are? Bright angel of the good light, In three words bring him to my sight. Well come, well go ; take him by the feet, And he comes thither fast and fleet. Devil of Mt. Etna dread, Peppino seize by the hairs of his head, Thou devil of the mouth awry, Peppino take and bring him nigh. In Holy Trinity its name. When sounds Ave Maria bring him home. It spoiled the congruity of Vanna' s charm that from force of habit she tacked a Holy Trinity tag belonging to some other 'razioni to an invocation of the devil. More to myself than to her I com- mented: "Why does every love-charm call up the evil one?" "He has great power," said Vanna, pulling her- self to her feet, and confirming her answer with a ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS a9 positive glance and nod. She was beginning an account of Satan's subjects — unbaptized babies who die while yet pagan and scream forever in the dark- ness, and dying sinners whose hair "the black man" clutches, shouting "Come on!" while they howl, "U-u-u-u-u!" when I brought her back to Pep- pino. The "recall" ended, she said, with a prayer, to "the sainted souls of the beheaded bodies," fol- lowed by nine paters, nine aves and nine glorias. During these and after the finish she made "the listening" standing at her window to catch the night sounds of the village. If this listening brought to her ears music or laughter or the ringing of bells, or the opening of doors, or if a cock crowed or a dog barked, her prayers were answered. But if an ass brayed or a cat miaued, or if she heard quarreling or the splash of water thrown into the street, these were bad omens. She folded away Peppino's goods and began cutting up lettuce leaves and throwing the green ribbons on the floor as she told me that, for her, the best sign of all was the appearance of a little white puppy that sometimes came and lay on her knees. When she saw this shadow dog, her 'razioni never failed. Lacking the puppy, she observed whether the star to which she had prayed "shut and then opened again," for this meant that it heard, thought and said "yes." Our stars, she said, give us the grace we ask of them. 30 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "It Is a great labor/' I said ; "this recall." "Yes," she admitted; "but it never fails." While the hens fought for the lettuce she asked to hear my prayer again, and I read: "Do thou, my Lady Moon, shine clear and fair, for softly. Goddess, to thee will I sing, and to Hecate of hell. The very whelps shiver before her as she fares through black blood and across the barrows of the dead. Hail, awful Hecate! to the end be thou of our company " When Vanna realized that my 'razioni, as well as her own, included knots, a turning spell, dogs and invocations to the moon and to a ruler of hell, she agreed that for a book prayer it was not bad. I continued to read, and we were still comparing notes when there came a thump at the door. "The old man!" sighed Vanna, going to let him in. "He swears by the Holy Devil," she said, "if he finds the door shut." Instead of swearing, the old man scuffed and stumped across the floor and hid himself in a chair behind the bed. But our seance was over. When I asked Vanna to complete the recall by reciting her prayer to the souls of the beheaded — criminals who, expiating their deeds by the forfeit of their lives, have acquired power to work miracles — she was absorbed In the pot of basil on her window ledge. She must put a wet cloth over it at night, she said, to make it grow better. She offered me ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 31 a few fragrant sprigs together with a double lemon — two lemons merged in one except for their twisted ends. "It is against malocchio; it makes the horns," she assured me, tucking it into my handbag. My first thought on reaching home was to look up an old prayer to S. Vito that I happened to have copied long before. The chief function of this' saint is to protect from the bite of mad dogs; he also casts out evil spirits, and his underworld connections are such that for centuries lovers have appealed to him. Gna Vanna's prayer, in fact, is a time-battered fragment of an old charm, included in a manuscript book of "secrets for making gold, constraining devils, evoking and divining the future" that was taken from Dr. Orazio di Adamo and used as evidence against him in his trial for witch- craft at Palermo in 1623. This 'razioni was to be said in a garden by moon- light. At the end a knife was to be stuck into a tree. Dr. Pitre gives a charm practically identical with Adamo's as still in use; but I have come upon nothing more than fragments which have undergone many changes. Once, for example, while a good- natured dealer in antiques was turning her drawers upside down for me in search of some trifle, there fell out a crumpled paper scrawled over with char- acters so illegible that it was with difficulty I recog- 32 BY-PATHS IN SICILY nized the prayer to S. Vito. The first six lines ran like Vanna's; then, as to the dogs, it continued: You must "sick" them into S 's heart, Hard as the pain of my grief's dart. And there it stopped. On the other side of the paper was a charm to be said in church. Smoothing out the sheet before us, my friend informed me with hesitation that to use it one must enter the church with the left foot foremost, hiding a red cord under the shawl. At the moment of the con- secration one must make three knots in the cord, saying: I do not come to mass to hear, Nor yet to worship Christ so dear. I come to bind with this my noose; I bind, I tie, I do not loose Till my love does all my pleasure. His feet I tie with this my noose, His hands I bind, I do not loose Till my love does all my pleasure. "It was a woman in Catania," said my friend, "who gave me these." "A wise woman?" I suggested. "Yes," she confessed; "but I don't use them. Sometimes when my husband is away on his busi- ness trips I should like to know — but I don't be- lieve in charms. And yet — do you know X ? He used to beat his wife till all the neighbors heard. ELF-LOCKS AND LOVE CHARMS 33 and now he takes her out in an automobile. They say she puts drops of her blood in his coffee. Some things don't seem true and yet But charms can't be of any use, else every man in Taormina would be married to a rich tourist." Elf-locks and incubators! Love-charms and automobiles ! CHAPTER II Donna Pruvidenza's Lemon John Bly and William Bly testified that, being employed by Bridget Bishop to help take down the Cellar-wall of the old House, wherein she formerly Lived, they did in Holes of the said old Wall find several Poppets, made up of Rags and Hogs Brussels, with headless Pins in them, the Points being outward. — Cotton Mather. Wonders of the Invisible World. Testimony against Bridget Bishop, executed, Salem, Mass., June lo, 1692. On the eighth of May, 191 3, there appeared in the "Giornale di SiciHa," of Palermo, an item which I abridge as follows: Yesterday an old man and woman, red-faced and out of breath, followed by a crowd of excited women, burst into the procuratore's office, crying: "We have found it! Look, Signore ! Look !" "See!" shouted the man; "see what killed our daughter!" The man laid on the table two parcels, one containing locks of chestnut hair, the other something made of wool. "Here is what killed my daughter !" screamed the woman, shuddering with terror. "Here is the witchcraft!" The two people were Emanuele Malerba and his wife An- tonina Bracciante, whose daughter died some time ago, a few months after marriage. The parents have suspected the girl's mother-in-law, who opposed the match, of making away with her by witchcraft. All the furniture, including the marriage bed, which the 34 DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 35 girl had carried as dowry to her husband, was restored in due course to her family; and the old mother, picking over the mattress, pricked her hand. Searching inside the bed, she found something in the shape of a doll into which were stuck a large needle, two safety pins, one black and the other white ; and two other safety pins on each of which was transfixed a seed of a nespolo (medlar). "Here is the witchcraft!" she thought. As soon as she had recovered she ran to tell hef husband and the neighbors. The quarter was thrown into commotion. To die at eighteen years by the will of God is one thing; to perish through the brutal malignity of a mother-in-law is quite another. One of the women explained : "When the seed dried, poor Rusidda died." "You see," said another, pointing to the doll without daring to touch it; "there is a seed at its stomach, which means that the witchcraft was made in the stomach of Rusidda." "It is true," shuddered the mother; "my daughter com- plained always of stomach pains." The two old people denounced the fact to the police, and when their complaint was not received seriously, they betook themselves to the public prosecutor, who also met their de- mand for justice with good-natured laughter. The father and mother, once again at home, allowed a brave young neighbor to cut open the image. When there came out more nespoli seeds mixed with sawdust they re- turned to their belief in the strange doll's errand of murder. "There is no justice!" they raved, glaring at the by- standers; "there is no justice!" There were thousands of years when learned judges did not laugh at such dolls, and ignorance does not yet laugh at them. Twelve hundred years before Christ, in the reign of Rameses III, a steward of the king was prose- cuted in an Egyptian court of law for causing 36 BY-PATHS IN SICILY paralysis to men and women by making wax figures of them. As late as 1692 the finding of "poppets" stuck full of pins was admitted in Salem, Mass., as evidence in a witch trial. Even now, maltreating an image to harm a man, if not actionable in court, and if not as usual everywhere as it may be in Amoy, where bamboo and paper "substitutes of per- sons" are sold ready-made, is certainly not a form of imitative magic confined to the primitive Bakongo. "Substitutes of persons" are not uncommon in Sicily; but oftener than into a human figure, simple like those of Amoy, or elaborate like those which thirteenth century black art modeled with the fea- tures of an enemy and baptized with his name, Sicilian magic stabs its jeers or its threats into an egg or a lemon, a potato or even a piece of meat. The first lemon of this sort that ever I saw in Taormina was a "substitute" of Donna Pruvidenza, and I had sight of it, as it were, by accident. If Donna Pruvidenza's confessor had not chanced to be at a church convention in Malta, she would have taken the "making" straight to him, after the man- ner of the more devout, to beg that he read a prayer over it, first putting on his stole. It was the absence of the priest that sent her to the kindly family who exorcised the lemon, much as he might have done, perhaps, by assuring her that it could do no harm; and who suggested that she bring it to me. It was on the terrace outside the dining room DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 37 that Donna Pruvidenza found me; and no sooner had Pietro set a chair and brought a second coffee cup than I saw that hers was no ordinary visit ; for though she drank with appreciation and was lavish of morning compHments, her manner was at once uneasy and that of a person even more conscious than prim little Donna Pruvidenza commonly is of her own importance. "Dear little Missy," she said when the coffee was finished, "can we not withdraw to some location less public? What I have to say to you is conse- quential." "Let us go to my room," I assented, for beyond the long window stood Pietro, arranging flowers for luncheon by putting into each glass blossoms of as many different colors as possible. As he opened the door for our retreat I saw him glance at a cloth Donna Pruvidenza carried, for it hurt Pietro's sense of the proprieties that parcels brought to me were apt to hold gifts of carob pods, dried chestnuts or hard Httle salted olives, beneath the dignity, as he considered it, of the dining room. In the quiet of my chamber Donna Pruvidenza untied the kerchief and laid it on the table. "Ah," I said, seeing among the folds of the cloth the shape of a lemon; "have you brought me some fruit?" "Cara Signurinedda !" There was horror in Donna Pruvidenza's voice, and in the gesture of her hands. 38 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Looking closer, I saw that the lemon which lay on the kerchief was livid with black and purple spots, exuding moisture and at the same time drying and warping out of shape. Stuck into it were nails, the rusty shanks of which were beginning to show as the fruit twisted, shrinking away from them. "What is that? A fattura?" I exclaimed, guess- ing at the meaning of the ugly thing. The parchment of Donna Pruvidenza's brown face crinkled with indignation. "It is a brutal sur- prise that I have brought the Signurinedda !" she ejaculated, her hands denouncing the authors of the injury ; "a surprise for me, an orphan who have no one to vindicate me, who am dedicated to the service of God, and who look for nothing but his graciosity and the protectorate of good people!" "Where did it come from ?" I questioned. Donna Pruvidenza began her account of the lemon with praise of her grandparents. While in quaint, high-flown phrase she extolled her family, I drew the kerchief to my side of the table. "The Signurinedda must not touch the 'gghiommaru' !" she interrupted herself to warn me. Why instead of lemon she said "gghiommaru," which means anything round like a ball of thread, I can only guess. Donna Pruvidenza never uses a common word when she can find an uncommon one. I had counted three needles, seven pins and five screws piercing the lemon, and had reached the thirty -first nail when she came to her own childhood. DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 39 "I called my progenitors 'father' and 'mother/ as did Jesus Christ, and morning and evening I asked their blessing, kissing their hands. While in the days of to-day the very off scouring of the streets scream 'Papal' 'Mamma!' as if they were ladies and gentlemen! . . . Madonna mia! The Signurinedda must not touch the thing!" "Where did you get it ?" I reiterated, pushing the kerchief away from me. "It is of the devil ! Of the brute beast !" Donna Pruvidenza would not be hurried. Half- listening to the ills of life that had reduced a person of her worth to the one inherited room that was her sole remaining property, I noticed that the nails ranged from cobbler's tacks to blacksmith's sizes and even to crooked board nails. In spite of all reassurances, my guest was ill at ease ; but no hoodoo could lessen the innocent satis- faction with which, pursing her lips and arching her brows like an old-fashioned New England spin- ster, she pouted out the river of her talk until she came at last to the great discovery. Someone had hidden the lemon in her oven. There it might have stayed, she said, till the viaticum was brought and the passing bell was tolled for her, since she never had flour with which to bake, if she had not touched it accidentally while reaching for a brush she kept inside. Donna Pruvidenza is old, nearly hump-backed and half-blind. She is poor, short of temper and 40 BY-PATHS IN SICILY sharp of tongue, the butt of many a brutal jest; but pride and an applauding conscience brought a smile of conviction to her lips as she said she must have been attacked because of envy. "Dear Missy, I am envied," she assured me ; "and where there is envy there is witchcraft, or there is the blow of the eye." Someone must have entered her room while she was at mass, she thought, or receiving the evening benediction; some evil-minded neighbor who saw that, even if she was poor and condemned to live in a bare and squalid nest, good friends when they had a nice dish to eat often sent for her to enjoy it with them. Because of her friends some envious person must have said, "How she is respected ! This morning So-and-So has sent her salted codfish! Such-a-One has given her a dress for the festa of San Pancrazio!" There flashed through my mind a vision of the cast-off dinner dress left by some tourist to a charity fund in Taormina, which Donna Pruvidenza had trailed with dignity through the dust of the Corso. "Dear little Missy," she concluded, "can any but the envious think me greedy if I accept now and then a cup of broth or even a little meat? Surely a person worthy of respect, an orphan without father or mother, ought not to suffer !" "The family you mentioned," I ventured, "are not your friends?" "Bad people !" It was not a month since Donna DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 41 Pruvidenza had begged her confessor to tell the man's wife that if she must throw at respectable neighbors words as hard as dog-killing stones, at least she "should throw them gently! gently! And 'this was the answer — to hide in her house a charm, as if she were a witch! "It is not that I fear!" she protested. "Not a leaf moves without the will of God; but" — she pushed her chair farther from the kerchief — "who would not shudder at the malignity that fills a lemon with nails?" Through the open window there came the cry of a peddler ! "Sixty brass pins for a soldo ! Four yards of tape for a soldo! Look, females; Look and buy ! *Tis a sin to leave them !" "Sixty pins for a soldo !" groaned Donna Pruvi- denza ; "and this is stuffed with nails !" Her emphasis led me to ask, "Are nails worse than pins ?" "Signurinedda !" Donna Pruvidenza was shocked. "Nails fastened our Lord to the cross! Never be- fore have I seen a 'gghiommaru' filled with nails !" In the end, Donna Pruvidenza gave me the lemon. It was not likely to harm me, she said, since the sending was not against me; and as to herself, she was not afraid, though it would be well if I would promise not to throw it away but to burn it, first taking out the nails. These points settled, she pulled up her rusty black shawl around her shoulders and trotted away — a pathetic little figure, pursing her 42 BY-PATHS IN SICILY lips and smiling with the discreet happiness of those conscious of well-doing. At the door she turned to say, "Cara Signuri- nedda, let all this remain between you and me." I had no thought of betraying Donna Pruvidenza's secret, but an hour later when I returned to my room the box into which I had shut the lemon was on the floor, and Tidda the Bat, dusting cloth in hand, was gazing at the evil looking fruit with horrified curiosity. "I did not touch it," she said in explanation; "it went down." Tidda 'a Taddarita has a way of bumping about the room as aimlessly as her namesake, the bat. This morning, whether dusting or bringing water, or lowering canvas screens against the May sun, her motions were even more hit-or-miss than usual. She did not pick up the lemon, and she could not keep her eyes away from it; she revolved around it, striking against whatever stood in the way. It was not until she stood at the open door, her tasks done, that she said, turning for once her brown and peaked face in my direction : "Scusi ; was that made against the Signurinedda?" "No," I answered, stopping to pick it up. "Jesus, Joseph and Mary! Jesus, Joseph and Mary!" Tidda crossed herself hastily, backing into the hallway. "For the love of God ! Little Missy, don't touch the bewitched thing!" I dropped the lemon into its box, "But since it is not against me " DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 43 "For the love of God !" Tidda's face worked con- vulsively. "One sees that the Signurinedda does not understand such things !" Tidda is a forlorn creature with high red cheek- bones, shiny little African eyes and a low forehead covered with black hair. By trade she is a carrier of water. Morning, noon and night, an earthen quartara on her head, her small black-clad figure comes to our door. Sometimes when the domestic machinery stalls I find her at work inside. Shutting the door with a blow of her broom, she poured out a flood of tales. Years ago there was a good woman in Taormina, she said, who used to give food to the prisoners in the jail. One day when this woman felt ill, a woman in the jail who was a witch asked her many questions and then begged her to bring an egg when she came back next day. The sick woman brought a fresh egg, laid by one of her own hens ; but when the witch broke the shell it was full of broken glass. The sick woman at once felt well. "That was long ago," I commented. "But it's not six months," returned Tidda, "since my chum found thorns in an orange stuck into the wall beside her door; and who knows what might have happened if she had not asked the priest to bless it?" "At least nothing did happen," I suggested. "Someone is ringing." "Something happened to Vitu 'u Moddu," Tidda 44 BY-PATHS IN SICILY persisted, shaking her head impatiently as a bell sounded from a neighboring room. "The Signurinedda knows Vitu the Soft, steward for the English in the villa? Two years ago Vitu fell so ill that no medicine could help him. Month after month he lay groaning in bed till one day a hunter thought he saw a bird fly into a hole in the rock above Vitu's house. The Signurinedda knows the place, under the hill on the path to Monte Ziretto ? So the hunter climbed up and put his hand into the hole; but it was not a nest of sparrows that he pulled out; it was the head of a kid full of pins. Vitu's wife called a priest to undo the spell, and Vitu has been as well ever since as he was before." Again the bell rang, but Tidda had plunged into the case of an uncle saved from death by a witch- finder's discovery of a thorn-filled potato. From the uncle she jumped to the tale of a bedridden woman who walked as soon as her son had dug in a place pointed out by a passing stranger. "Your ills are before your door," the stranger said, and indeed they found the dried liver of an animal. "Bad people do these things," she concluded, as a third time the bell jangled; "witches who ought to die like dogs ! Why does the Signurinedda handle things made by witches?" After luncheon a fear that Tidda might gossip about the lemon was confirmed when Pietro detained me in the dining-room to see a photograph of the DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 45 palace on Staten Island inhabited by his brother. The "palazzo," which looked like a brick tenement, was distant from New York one little hour by train- in-air, steamship and train-of-fire ; and to it he wished to send a package for which would I please write the address? Pietro did not approach abruptly the topic of Donna Pruvidenza's lemon. The parcel was to con- tain razors, for Pietro's brother is a barber, and in New York razors cost too much money. There were to be stockings knitted by his signora — Pietro's wife is his "lady" — and a loaf of baked "ricotta," which is curd sun-dried and browned in an oven. For his brother's children there was a quantity of a hard almond sweet called "torrone." It was while we were planning the packing of these articles that Pietro began a gently superior discourse on Tidda's cowardice and my curiosity as to lemons. A lemon turned into a pincushion was only a lemon. He ought to know, for had he not paid more than four hundred lire for the finding of a piece of meat stuck full of nails? And had it done him any good to have the nails taken out ? Not a particle! Once he had believed such foolishness, but now he knew better. "Four hundred lire !" I exclaimed ; for Pietro is a plodding man of fifty, careful of his money. "Four hundred lire!" he repeated with mild cynicism; was he not then a judge of such matters? The thing had happened some years earlier, he 46 BY-PATHS IN SICILY said, when he had given up his profession as a waiter, because his signora had tired of starching shirts and collars. "A waiter," he exclaimed, with a glance at his Hnen, "must always be clean." So he had opened a shop for the sale of salted codfish, oil, wine and macaroni — such things as people need. But trade was not good, and to make matters worse a great oil jar leaked one night, and the oil ran over the floor and even into the street. Now to spill oil is a bad sign, and for days his lady was ill with worry. Just at this time there came to their door one morning a woman who begged food. When she had eaten and rested, the poor woman seemed grate- ful, and offered to search the house for the evil influence that interfered with sales. When he and his signora understood that she had such power they agreed gladly. So for days she searched, eat- ing always of the best, until at last she declared the place was haunted by a demon. "We believed her," said Pietro with melancholy scorn of past credulity, "because, though we never saw anything, we often heard a 'pum ! pum !' " "E-e-e — I think now," he added with hesitant utterance that was not yet a stammer, "that she may have made the noise herself." The woman carried away a suit of Pletro's cloth- ing, which she said must be burned. "It was a good suit," he sighed reminiscently. One night she led him and his lady to a lonely DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 47 place behind a church, when she made them dig at the roots of a clump of fichi d'India. The charm was buried there, she said ; but they found nothing. The next night she took them down to the sea and walked into the water until it reached her knees. There she searched a long time, and when she came back she brought a bag that held a piece of meat full of broken glass and nails. This, she said, was the source of their misfortunes; some rival had pierced the flesh as if it had been their bodies. The woman took the nails out of the meat and burned it. Then she sprinkled salt and water in the house, repeating charms. She demanded much money because she had found the charm in the sea. "That proved her clever?" I questioned. "Yes," conceded Pietro; "at least she said so." "Of course," confirmed Tidda, who had bumped into the room and was picking up dishes. "The Signurinedda sees that a charm hidden in a house may perhaps be found quickly, and so do little mischief; but what is lost in the sea only a person of great power can find. It goes on working until it kills the one against whom it was made. For a charm thrown into the sea there is no pardon ; God cannot forgive such wickedness." "Business was no better," said Pietro skeptically, comforting himself with bites at a medlar. "I gave up the shop and came back to waiting." Before the day was done I took the lemon to the padrona's sewing room, begging her to check 48 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Tidda's tongue, though I had no faith that our silence would prevent the spreading of Donna Pruvidenza's news. The mistress of our house is so wise in the lore of the people that whatever of interest I hear is submitted to her judgment. Looking up from her mending, she regarded curiously the discolored lemon, which was still leaking juice and bulging and shrinking around the puncture of the rusty nails. Poking it with her plump thimble finger, she told me fresh tales of haps and mishaps with charms. Often as she had heard of such things, never before, she said, had she seen one. "But fear of witchcraft," I queried, "is not yet forgotten?" The padrona looked long toward the courtyard beyond the terrace, where her husband and the cook were bowling. **Fear of lemons like this, yes," she said finally. "If a woman's neighbors think her a witch and threaten her with this counter-witchcraft, one sees the threat is harmless, because such people do not know the proper words to use when sticking in the nails." "What proper words?" demanded Maria, the laundress, checking her song, "The sun which goes to-day returns to-morrow," as she came in from the terrace with an armload of folded towels. Maria told us the tale of a girl who once picked up a lemon from the ground, when teased about her betrothed, and in a joke began pricking it with Door Charms for Evil Eye DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 49 thorns. "This in his head !" she said. "This in his arm! This in his leg!" The girl was washing at the riverside, and no sooner had she and the others reached home with their bundles of dry clothes than she heard that her betrothed had come from reaping seized with terrible pains. Running back to her washing stone, she found the lemon and pulled out the thorns. Next morning her lover was well. "What words did that girl know?" laughed Maria, as she took up her song again and started towards the garden to pick towels from the flowering bushes. "The thorns are the thing!" In Sicilian magic few acts are performed without accompanying incantations. The padrona's re- minder, therefore, of the need of words decided me not to touch the nails until I knew whether their extraction required a formula. I did not hope to learn the putting in of nails. "Release, yes; bind, no," is a saying in the mouth of every adept. But if to black magic no one would own, in the white magic of undoing a spell someone might instruct me. Gna Angela, called the Fox, who censes houses to drive out the evil eye, and Gna Vanna, the Grass- hopper-eater, who claims uncanny powers, because of her protection by the "ladies," were the women I planned to consult. I should not have thought of Za Tonietta, whose dealings with the unknown are more limited, had I not come across her next so BY-PATHS IN SICILY morning, crouched in a recess of the ivy-clad wall near my own door. Indeed, at first nothing was farther from my thoughts than magic, for Za Tonietta's grizzled hair stood up in moist rings, her kerchief was open at the throat, and she was gasp- ing "As God wills," bent double with asthma. I sat down beside her in the flickering shade of the pepper trees, and after a while, when the strug- gle for breath became less violent, she told me that she was on her way to a house where a death had occurred, to sprinkle holy water, which she had taken from the three fonts of the Matrice, the mother church. In her lap there lay a bottle which still carried a Worcestershire-sauce label. While we rested there came in sight a swarm of children playing a favorite game of our street — conducting a saint's procession. Down the winding road, carried on the shoulders of ivy-crowned boys and girls, advanced a toy Vara, adorned with candles and flowers, and holding, instead of a church image, a rude print of Sant' Alfio and his brothers. Ahead marched a tiny boy ringing a bell to stop and start the bearers. Behind flocked children shouting vivas. "As God wills !" wheezed Za Tonietta, when the procession, to which she had hardly lifted her eyes, had gone its way. Sant' Alfio was a powerful saint, but it was to our own San Pancraziu, great father of the people, that she prayed: DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 51 1 To the ten thousandth time we raise San Pancraziu's high praise; We praise him daily when we wake, Who Taormina safe doth make, she recited, smiling drearily. She had prayed much to be well, but at night she could not lie in her bed. In Za Tonietta's windowless house asthma is not as God, but as building custom wills. Waiting till she dragged herself to her feet, I rose also; and then, remembering my errand, showed her the lemon. The result startled me. At sight of the shrunken, ominous-looking thing Za Tonietta dropped back into her seat, clutching at the bag of amulets pinned under her dress, and racked by a spasm of coughing that shook her bowed old figure. When at last she panted that the lemon was "to die! to die!" I had had more proof than I liked that it could do mis- chief. As Za Tonietta moved wavering down the road with her holy water, and I turned towards Gna Vanna and the village, I could think of nothing but the cruelty of fear which ages of life had not driven out of so radiant a world. In the morning sun the gray-green mountain wall above the town drew so close that I could follow the movements of men and goats up and down the zig- zags, to and from the old castle of Taormina, and the church of the Madonna of the rock. ^A la decimila vota Lu ludamu San Pancraziu; Lu ludamu la matina Ca prutiggi Taormina. 52 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Over the gray walls between which winds our road, purple flower clusters hung from the patience trees. From cypress and cedar, and even from tall eucalyptus dropped curtains of honeysuckle. Olives were blossoming green, and the lemon gardens in white bloom scented the air. The village was out of doors. As trees gave way to gray-white houses, I came up with Cola the rope- maker, who had planted his wheel in a shaded spot and was rubbing down yellow lengths of cord with halved lemons. Beside their doorstones were the gossips, wash- ing, knitting, spinning, making nets and nursing babies. Men, too, had brought out chairs to the cobblestones, where they plaited fishtraps, cobbled shoes or, seated on the ground, twisted with fingers and toes store of rush twine against the wheat binding. Even the tinsmith had littered the street with petroleum tins to be knocked down to usable sheets of metal. I found Gna Vanna standing over a wandering tinker who was drilling holes in the fragments of a thick earthen basin. "Have a care!" she warned the swart young Calabrian, as he raised and lowered the rude cross-bow contrivance that turned the point of his drill. "Have a care !" she repeated while he patched together the huge dish, straddling wire pins from hole to hole and poking in cement as a final operation. Vanna looked cross, and as I stepped indoors to DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 53 avoid the tilt over pennies for the mending, I saw that an upset house had perhaps upset her temper. The once smoke-blackened walls were wet with whitewash, and in the middle of the spattered floor were heaped goods and chattels. "Badly have I done!" she fretted, bringing in the big dish and setting it down anxiously. "The house was too dirty, but five lire they made me pay ! Bad Christians! They broke the basin, and in a week smoke and flies will make things worse than before!" There is a vent above Vanna's fireplace which smoke never finds. Without the name of its owner the charm did not soothe Gna Vanna. As I took the cover off its box she signed an impatient cross or two, looking from it to me with irritation. The victim must be suffering pains in the ears, eyes and stomach, she asserted ; and whose was the blame if I refused to take her to the house, so that she might drive out the witchcraft by her prayers ? "Vossia knows that I understand these things," she pursued with the air of an unappreciated genius, planting the tip of a skinny forefinger in the middle of her forehead. "There is no one else who under- stands them. Let them call me witch! Vossia knows that I am respected because I have broken many evil charms." Whether in the end she would have relented and taken out the nails, I cannot tell; for as she jerked 54 BY-PATHS IN SICILY a chair from the piled up furniture, there crawled from some cave underneath her grandson Micciu and the white-faced kid, Sciuriddu. Fresh almond leaves satisfied "Little Flower" ; but Micciu ranged the floor, dragging the kid by the red rag at his neck, scrambling after a dish of raw, shining fish and tugging at his one garment, a dingy little shift. "Nanna," he teased, "take it off, grandma! It's hot!" "Fui! Fui! Run away!" scolded Vanna; and the child, seizing a fish, darted towards the street, bump- ing into a fleshy, middle-aged woman who appeared in the doorway. At sight of me, Comare Alfia, Vanna's sister-in- law, came forward with hesitation. Lowering her- self into a chair, she sat in heavy silence, her round, not unkindly face set in lines of dissatisfaction. My chance was gone, and I was rising to yield the field when, responding little by little to complaints about the price of whitewashing, Comare Alfia gathered confidence, and put into Vanna's hand a thick knotted cord braided of red and green rags. "What is it?" asked Vanna, glancing sharply from the braid to the lumpy face of her sister-in-law. "I want to know," answered Comare Alfia; "what is it?" Her suspicious eyes fixed on the cord, Comare Alfia explained that she had found it an hour before among the vine cuttings with which she was feeding the fire in her oven. It might be harmless, but DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S XEMON 55 she could not feel safe unless Vanna undid the knots, for her head ached and her stomach felt as if it also were tied in knots. It was just such a sending that two years earlier had killed her hus- band, and she knew well the wretches who had twisted the spell. On that very street they lived, not many doors away. They had quarreled with her husband over the price of two hens, and now perhaps they had braided this cord to twist and tie her vitals also. The law ought to punish such assassins. Gna Vanna studied the braid which had been made the more deadly by three knots drawn tight. "It may be," she agreed, "a fattura." Restored to good humor by her sister-in-law's openly expressed dependence, Gna Vanna asked me to show the lemon. At sight of the nails Comare Alfia displayed something like animation, while I tried to look wise over the charms. A fellow feeling being thus established, I was allowed to stay while Vanna conjured the harm that might have been planned against her sister-in-law's bowels. First muttering formulas of which "name of God" was all I heard, she picked at the first knot until she had loosened and untied it, repeating the while: Hair of God and Mary's hair, Be called home this witchcraft sair! Let there be praised and thanked The most holy Sacrament 56 BY-PATHS IN SICILY And God's great Mother Mary And all the heavenly company. In the name of God and for Jesus* sake, Let this woman no harm take. Comare Alfia, who sat hunched forward in her chair by Vanna's side, paid dolorous attention as Vanna smoothed the kinky strands and passed to the second knot, reciting while she tugged with persistent fingers, The ass, the ass, he came on feet four; It was St. Mark on his back he bore. In the name of God, for St. Pancras' sake. Let this woman no harm take. The third knot was more difficult. "The knife !" called Gna Vanna impatiently. "Micciu, the knife !" Micciu, who had strayed back to the doorstone, brought her from the table drawer a knife and the loaf he found with it. "Always bread in your mouth! Devil's face!" she ejaculated, kissing him as she cut a big piece. Then slashing the knot, she proceeded : Four loaves and four fishes. Out, I say, with ill wishes ! Bright angel of the good light. In three words I break evil's might. In the name of God and of St. John, If there's harm, I cut; 't is gone. While Vanna unbraided the strands she continued to recite charms for good measure. Comare Alfia DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 57 brightened enough to twitch her white kerchief straight, so that the knot came under her chin. When I left the house she was gathering the red and green rags to burn, and Gna Vanna was re- peating, 2 Star of the Eastern light, Never back but forward bright. To the three, to the three, to the three, And even to the twenty-four. Now this witchcraft is no more. In Jesus' name I undo the charm ; ■Never more shall it work harm. Though Gna Vanna had recited nothing over the lemon, I felt sure that, if I had been able to take her to Donna Pruvidenza, her procedure, as to the nails, would not have differed in essentials from her conjuring of the knots. It was to get, if pos- sible, a different method that I set out in the after- noon to find Gna Angela, the Fox, who is perhaps wiser in old lore than Gna Vanna. May in Sicily is summer and the town was taking its siesta. Shops were shut as I passed through the Corso, streets empty. Nothing stirred but dart- 2 Stidda di lu luveri, Veni avanti e mai arreri ! A li tri, a li tri, a li tri E sinu a li ventiquattru ; Ssu malunatu e sfasciatu. Pi lu nomu di Gesu, Sciogghiu ssa fimmina; E nun mi avi nenti chiu. S8 BY-PATHS IN SICILY ing lizards. Even the blackbirds were silent in the many cages ranged against the house walls. But while I climbed to the high under-the-castle quarter of Taormina, a little breeze began to wake the sea. Its effect was magical. • Heavy black wooden doors opened, and from under round-arched doorways came women carrying water jars that lay slantwise on their heads as they started towards the fountains. Women appeared on little iron balconies taking in dry clothes from long cane poles. The tottering old people at the Hospice crept out on their terrace. Sounds arose of chatter and singing. From a distance as I approached Gna Angela's house I saw her across the way from her door, sitting at her netting beside the wall towards the sea. She was alone; but even while I hurried for- ward, there appeared two women coming over the hill from an opposite direction. They reached her first. There was a moment of gesticulation; and then, picking up the chair in which she had been sitting and another over which were folded the brown lengths of her net, Gna Angela crossed the road with the newcomers. It was too late to retreat ; but instead of following the three into the house, I sat down on the door- stone, watching the chickens that old Zu Paulu, Gna Angela's husband, was taking one by one from under a tall, rush-woven cage and protecting from evil eye by tying red rags under their pinfeathery wings. DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 59 The two women, who looked like mother and daughter, were telling their errand when Gna 'An- gela came to the door to wish me good-day ; and so it chanced that I overheard their anxiety about the younger one's husband. Desperately ill he was, the mother said, in New York. The news had come a week before, and now for seven days they had had no letter. Was he getting better or was he dead? Would Gna Angela tell them? More than once I had heard Gna Angela, the Fox, pronounce on the health of absent relatives, so that her agreement to this request did not sur- prise me. Drawing her chair into the breeze at the doorway, she sat almost at my side, clasping her hands about her knees and composing herself to immobility. Little by little her faded eyes became veiled, and her queer animated old face put on a mask devoid of expression. Surreptitiously I pulled out a pencil, for I guessed that she would recite the so-called "paternoster of San GiuUano," protector of travelers. Presently, crossing herself, she muttered "Jesus, St. Joseph and Mary!" and then words began to pour from her lips in a rapid, colorless stream. Faster and faster, becoming almost inarticulate, ran the river of sound. It seemed a long time before, suddenly as it had begun, the flow stopped. The gray old figure straightened itself. Gna Angela's eyes brightened, and her half-opened mouth snapped shut with a look of satisfaction. 6o BY-PATHS IN SICILY "Your spouse is well," she said to the younger woman. "You will soon hear from him." "Are you sure?" the two demanded. There fol- lowed a hubbub of questions. "It is certain," replied Gna Angela in the tone of one who finishes a simple matter. "It is not I who tell you; it is San Giuliano himself, the mirac- ulous saint who never mistakes. Did you not hear ? The words came quick and smoothly ; I said it three times through without missing a syllable. It is San Giuliano himself who says it: Your spouse is well." As Gna Angela spoke she rose, dismissing her guests. Old, sinewy, a little bent, she seemed, as she leaned against a doorpost, indifferent as a sybil to the doubts of the ignorant. • "Come, daughter," she said, touching my shoulder to indicate the turn of another client. The women were impressed. Dropping coppers into her hand, they came out of the house, bidding a cheerful good-by to Zu Paulu as they trudged down the road, two black figures in the white Sicilian sunshine. "Come, daughter," repeated Gna Angela, inviting me into the bare little room. By repute Gna Angela is a witch, able to call up spirits of the dead; but the trade, if such it is, yields her little more than the bed, the bench and the chest of the old song of the dancing master: Trois pas du cote du banc Et trois pas du cote du lit; DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 6i Trois pas du cote du cofifre Et trois pas — revenez ici. Driving out a hen from the heap of stones that served her as fireplace, Gna Angela questioned me with a look as she sat down before the broken chair that held the unfinished net. "Won't you say the paternoster again?" I begged, for I had not succeeded in writing the half of the old charm, which for who knows how many cen- turies, anxious women have invoked for news of travelers. "Again ?" she queried. I showed my pencil. "Please; say it slowly for me." "Ah," she said good-naturedly; "you will tell it to the wise in your own country. Listen then, daughter." Dropping again the reed netting needle, she loos- ened her neckerchief, uncovering her corded yellow throat. Then she looked meditatively at me and away again, and the flood of words recommenced. I could not keep pace with it, and a request to repeat caused Gna Angela's jaw to drop and her brown and yellow mottled face to look hopelessly bewil- dered. That old gossip, Pliny, says that in order to ensure the exact recital of certain Roman public prayers, one assistant read the formula in advance of the celebrant, while others kept silence in the 62 BY-PATHS IN SICILY audience and played the flute to shut out extraneous sounds. A slip in the prayer spoiled the omens. Gna Angela had no help, and a slip in the pater- noster was disastrous. To ensure success she rushed to the end on impetus. If she paused, the thread broke. As nearly as I could catch it, what she recited ran: Come the true cross to adore Which down from Calvary they bore; May grace and light our -spirits foster To say St. Julian's paternoster. Once St. JuHan went to the chase ; In his hand his good stick found its place. To Mary, great Virgin, chance him led; Great St. Julian spoke and said: At this court good friends we be; From evil foes deliver me; From doctors, too, and jails unkind And from misfortune's cruel mind; From raging demons set me free, From mad dogs' bites safe let me be. Should any wish to do me harm, May a dead man's heart inspire his arm; But mine the heart of a lion strong That wreaks its wrath on doers of wrong. This morn I rose up from the sod, And my right foot with speed I shod. St. George's sword to my side I girt; Mary's mantle shielded me from hurt. Then down I went unto the sea. Where one and all my foes met me; Down on their faces they fell in the mould. While I stood up like a lion bold. DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 63 Be it on the road, or indeed safe at home, Come with me, Saviour, where'er I roam. Be it on the road or indeed by the way. Come with me, Mary mother, I pray. Be it on the road or indeed on the plain. Come with me ever, St. Julian. Be it on the road or when danger is near, Come with me ever, St. Antonine dear. This St. Julian is he of whom the Golden Legend says that, having slain in ignorance his father and mother, he did penance in long wanderings. Indeed Dr. Pitre gives a form of the paternoster which begins : His mother he slaughtered, his father he slew; St. Julian he to the mountain flew. I have heard a similar version from a woman who, instead of resorting to a witch, had memorized the charm and would retire into a corner, shut her eyes and recite it whenever her husband, whose business took him much from home, failed to return at an expected time. When Gna Angela had resumed her netting and I with apologies for my many questions, had pro- duced the lemon, I discovered a witch's limitations. Gna Angela could cure headache by driving away its cause — the evil eye; she could tell me of the life or death of friends beyond the ocean; but before the lemon she confessed ignorance. Touching gingerly the nails which, as the skin of the fruit grew dry, began to stick out like chevaux 64 BY-PATHS IN SICILY de frise, she said it would take strong magic, the magic of a book, to undo such a spell. Once she had known a priest who had a book of the fifteenth century. (Fifteenth-century charm-books are most esteemed.) She had no book. I must ask a priest to read a prayer over it, first putting on his stole. My second call having proved even less satisfac- tory than the first, I planned as I left Gna Angela's door to submit the lemon as a last resort to a witch of whose powers I had heard much — a woman who lived at Piedimonte at the foot of Etna. But the notion was short-lived. I had not yet reached the flight of steps at the head of my own street when an urgent voice said, "Cara Signurinedda !" \nd there was Donna Pruvidenza harnessed by a string to a packing case which she was dragging through the Corso with a serene disregard of on-lookers. "Dear little Miss !" she repeated in a tone of im- portance and uneasiness. "That badly educated, the wife of screams maledictions against all who respect me ! You have destroyed the lemon ?" Donna Pruvidenza's apprehensions had so in- creased that it was not until I had promised imme- diate action that she demanded admiration of the packing box. "Firing for weeks ! Hot food I shall have!" she exulted. "Ah, Missy, 's wife has reason to envy me my friends !" The lemon went to the kitchen fire. I have kept the pins, the needles, the screws and the nails. For DONNA PRUVIDENZA'S LEMON 65 Donna Pruvidenza's sake I recited as I pulled them out, a revised edition of one of Gna Vanna's charms: Star of the Eastern light, Never back but forward bright. To the three, to the three, to the three And even to the twenty-one; Now this lemon is undone. Thus do I take out the nails, And thus the spell of all harm fails. CHAPTER III Cola Pesce The king seized the goblet — he swung it on high, And, whirHng, it fell in the roar of the tide: "But bring back that goblet again to my eye, And I'll hold thee the dearest that rides by my side; And thine arms shall embrace as thy bride, I decree, The maiden whose pity now pleadeth for thee." — "The Diver." Schiller. It was at his sister Brigida's wedding party that Cola asked why I did not come oftener to the marina to fish with him. "The Taormina boats are Wind," I said; "I like better the fishing boats of Catania, because they have eyes, and they are painted with saints." "We carry our saints in our hearts," retorted Cola, "instead of painting them on our boats." Then he left me to take his place In the tarantella. Brigida was dancing, a brown girl with almond- shaped Arab eyes; and the bridegroom and others of the fisher folk. The clear space for the dancers had but the length of twelve bricks of the uneven pavement; the musicians had barely room for their elbows ; but the "Sucking Babes" played — it was the "Babes" and not the "Rats," I think, who sent 66 COLA PESCE 67 music; the "Babes" and the "Rats," conservatives and radicals, do not mix at weddings any more than in poHtics — till the floor shook, and the basket-work fish traps that hung in clusters from the ceiling, shook also. It was hard to move without stepping on plates, and Brigida's mother was still dishing roasted kid and spaghetti to be sent to the neighbors. Brigida's sister served wine and "Spanish bread," which is a powdery sponge cake; and later, when the day de- clined towards sunset, and we had helped Brigida out of her cotton house dress, and into her dove- colored wedding silk and white scarf, and had stood about pretending not to see her weep as she kissed the hands of her father and mother in good-by, we walked in procession through the narrow streets conducting Brigida and Santu to the little white- washed upper room that was to be the new home. It was after we had admired the knitted counter- pane of the big white bed and the fine oil lamp and the colored prints of saints and the royal family, and the band had played at the door, and we had said good wishes to the couple that, as Cola and I walked away together, he said, "Signorina, Occhietti, who fishes from Giardini, has a Catania boat; I shall borrow it, and my father and I will take you fishing to-morrow morning." "After all, I prefer the Nuovo Sant' Alfio," I an- swered. Cola's boat, the New Saint Alfio, was an old and 68 BY-PATHS IN SICILY leaky tub as long ago as when I first saw Cola perched on the wall by the highway above the beach at Isola Bella, kicking together his hard little-boy heels and hailing every passing tourist with, "Voli battellu? Andiamu a li grotti?" The poor old boat has been fishing by night and taking tourists to the grottoes by day from then until now, when Cola has done his military service and feels himself a man; so I repented that I had scorned so tried a friend as the sea-worn saint and had longed for painted boats with eyes. "We'll ask Occhietti to come with us," said Cola, "and bring his boat, the San Pancraziu." And so it happened that when I opened my door at three o'clock next morning a dark figure that stood leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the Via Bagnoli Croce started towards me from under the red-flowering pomegranate tree, and there was Cola, carrying a little lantern and a big basket, the padded rim of which was stuck full of the many hooks of a baited trawl. "Why have you brought the trap?" I asked, for setting a trawl is not lively fishing. "Let us lift some pots for lobsters." "We shall lift lobster traps," said Cola. "Come on ! Father has gone down already." There were stars in the blue-black sky, and the Fisherman's Path, which drops sharp and steep from Taormina to the sea, is cut for the most part against the bare rock face of the mountain; but COLA PESCE 69 when our stump of a candle flickered out, I could have wished for another to relight the tiny lantern, for the zig-zags are rough, and here the heavy leaf- age of a carob tree, and there a miniature pass, left us in thick warm darkness without vision. Even on the blindest turns Cola's bare feet trod boldly as if it were noon; but my groping hands made sad acquaintance in the long steps down from stone to stone with dusty brambles and the harsh stubble of cut forage, or the dry white stems of wormwood, for it was mid-June, when the Southern world is burnt and gritty. There was not a growing thing along our way except thistle heads and the pink blossoms of an oleander shrub. But at last we passed under the walls of the inn that stands by the high road and so down to the water, just as a low pale streak in the East began to hint the dawn. At the little curving harbor between Isola Bella and the rock of Capo Sant' Andrea we found griz- zled old Vanni, who is Cola's father, and Turriddu, his cousin, putting rollers under the bow of the New Saint Alfio and the equally battered Madonna della Rocca, and drawing the two boats down the beach. Occhietti's long Catania-built boat, the San Pancrazio, was just coming up to the landing rock through the narrow clear way between the stones. Occhietti, like his boat, is named Pancrazio; but his little twinkling eyes make him Occhietti as in- evitably as Turriddu's thirst makes him Acquaf risca. Occhietti had been spearing fish all night by the 70 BY-PATHS IN SICILY light of a gas torch, many-branched, like the horns of a stag, a light of which most of the older fisher- men strongly disapprove. "Very beautiful, Vossia !" he said exultingly,,hold- ing up to view in the yellow flare, a big poulpe, all stomach and arms. "A beauty of a polyp !" exclaimed Turriddu. "Splendidu!" cried Cola. "Magnificu !" I echoed as in duty bound. "Beauty of a torch !" growled Vann!, who is not moved often to such ill-temper. "Vossia knows that the light goes down into the water and burns the fish, so that they do not taste good; and little fish that are not caught are burned so that they never grow well." "Beautiful pennies to pay for the gas!" taunted Occhietti, dropping the devil fish and poising his long-handled trident. "Some boatmen have not the heart to put out the money!" "A stomach-twisting to you!" snarled Vanni. "Did you ever hear," I asked in a hurry, "of the old Greek of Syracuse who ate a poulpe a meter long and ached so with colic after it that his doctor told him to dispose quickly of his affairs? *I have disposed of all but the head,' he groaned, dying ; 'and if you will bring it, I will dispose of that also.' " "It is true the stomach must be strong," grinned Occhietti; "but a good eating of polyp is worth a twisting of the inwards." "Come on!" he said sharply to the boy who stood COLA PESCE 71 at the oars; and the San Pancrazio slid away over the warm black water to lie in wait for more poulpes under the rock shadows of the Beautiful Island. "Deaf .doctors to you, and dead druggists !" mut- tered Vanni, angry at the desertion. Turriddu had hung two great fish-traps shaped like beehives to the bow-post of the Madonna della Rocca; he pushed out leisurely behind Occhietti. Cola brought oars from the fish-house on the beach and a longish cane with a hook at the end and a heavy spear. Then we, too, with Vanni, climbed aboard, and the tubby Nuovo Sant' Alfio took the water last of the three. Cola's trousers were rolled up to the knee, and as he stood pushing forward his clumsy oars tied each to its single oar peg, his dark figure took just the attitude of the rower in one of the Herculaneum pictures. Like most of the Taormina boats, the Nuovo Sant' Alfio is heavy and squat, hardly more than fourteen feet long, with three thwarts and decked a little at the bow. Her sea-keeping furniture is as dingy as her planks — two traps swinging at her bow-post, tangles of net like mops stowed under the bow seat, cheek by jowl with a basket for bread, a fat jug for carrying water, and a flask for oil; and in her side cleats, and under foot, knives, stones for weighing fish and coils of rope twisted of rushes so roughly that the ends bristle at every joining. We were outside of Isola Bella, and Vanni was setting the trawl when we began talking about Cola 7a BY-PATHS IN SICILY Pesce. It takes time to put out four hundred hooks, passing each through the hand to make sure it is running true and is well baited. First, Vanni threw overboard one of our rope coils. A stone tied in a loop went to the bottom, and at the other end floated slices of sea-bleached cork strung on the rope like little islands. Near these floats he tied the trap. Each drop line with its hook was two meters long, perhaps, and each was separated by several feet from its neighbors. The pale streak in the East was turning crimson, but the sea was blacker than before. Turriddu had put out a trolling line at each side of the Madonna della Rocca, and had headed North beyond our view. In the distance towards Naxos gleamed the drifting lights of a dozen torches. From the beach beyond Capo Sant' Andrea came the distant shouts of men hauling a seine. Of a sudden one of Vanni's hooks, as it went over- side, caught in floating pumice, such as is driven at times through the Straits of Messina from Strom- boli. We took aboard some spongy pieces, for the floors of Taormina are scoured and the hearth for the winter fire is lined with pumice. "Do you often find it like this in open sea?" I asked. "Oftener at the beach," said Cola. "When the current sets North it will wash ashore at our marina." "Like the body of Cola Pesce?" I suggested. COLA PESCE 73 "Like Cola Pisci," to my surprise assented Cola. At Messina I once went fishing with an old man who prattled of the legendary diver who inspired Schiller's ballad as of a hero well remembered ; but though tradition says that the body of Nicola, the Fish, who plunged into the whirlpool of CharySSis to gratify a whim of Frederic II, the Suabian, was cast up at Taormina, and though the tale itself is one of the commonest told in Sicily, never before had I heard his name among our fishermen. "Just where did they find Cola Pesce?" I pursued. "How should I know?" returned Cola, who is of the newer days, scornful of old fables. "It is my father who talks of Cola Pisci," he added. By this time the trawl was set, and Vanni was dropping the buoy and anchor. I was silent until he had finished; then, as the Nuovo Sant' Alfio, now half a mile beyond the island, turned slowly towards its outer ledges, I said, "Aren't there dolphins out yon? They remind me always of Cola Pesce." Vanni is taciturn when his son is with us, and I glanced towards his end of the boat without much hope of drawing an opinion. "They bring bad weather," was his only response at the moment; but after a little, pulling off his sun-faded cap and scratching among the curls of his grizzled hair, he went on slowly: "In the days of to-day there is no one who speaks of Cola Pisci. The young men have never heard of him. But my mate and I reason together about 74 BY-PATHS IN SICILY him once in a while, because we are of the old times. My 'cumpari' does not wish to believe it, but I hold that Cola Pisci deceived the king." "You think," I asked, "that he was not drowned?" "No," said Vanni. "There are those who hold that he swam away under the sea, because he was half man and half fish; but I say that he deceived the king. My chum says that the king threw into the sea a cup of gold ; but my grandfather, who died very old, always told me that it was a golden plate that twinkled with precious stones." Vanni spoke deliberately, planning his argument. "And the king threw this plate into the round whirlpool that they call the 'Carnation'.?" "Yes, Charybdis. And the king said to Cola Pisci, Tf you go to the bottom and bring it up to me again, it is yours !' And Cola threw himself into the sea and brought back the king's plate in his hand. *There it is. Majesty!' he said. And the king gave it to him as he had promised. But then the king threw in a ring, and told Cola he must go down a second time and bring this up also. "Why?" demanded Vanni, his bronzed wrinkled face asking the question as earnestly as his tone. "Why did the King say to Cola Pisci, 'Again you must go down and you must fetch me this ring?* "Because," replied Vanni to his own question, "my grandfather said that when Cola brought back the golden plate he had not been to the bottom. How did he know? My grandfather's ancients said COLA PESCE 75 that Cola had not been gone long enough to get to the bottom ; and they were fishermen. A fisher- man always knows the depth of water. The boat- men of Messina must have told the king how many fathoms deep is Charybdis. And then the plate " Vanni finished the sentence with his hand, rocking it to show the dipping motion with which a flat object sinks slowly, like a falling leaf. "Understand, Vossia?" He repeated the dipping motion, "It was still near the surface when Cola reached it. It was for this that the king sent him down again, to go really to the bottom, which Cola did not succeed in doing. You persuade yourself, Vossia?" Vanni did not argue as a partisan. His heavy grizzled brows shadowed his puckered face, and he smiled good-humored admission of the perplexities of the case as he reasoned his way through it; but at the end he lifted his head with the air of one whom logic has satisfied. His "You persuade your- self, Vossia ?" was less a question than a chance for me to affirm my conviction. "But Cola's body," I queried, "where did it come to land?" . "My grandfather's ancients told him nothing of that," he answered. "Somewhere at the beach; or it might be yonder at the Grotto of the Bats." In the tourist season the Grotto of the Bats be- comes the Grotto of the Doves, and there are those who count its changing emerald lights more beauti- 76 BY-PATHS IN SICILY ful than those of the Blue Grotto of Capri. Look- ing across at its mouth in the wall of Capo Sant* An- drea was like regarding the grave of Poseidon; for Cola Pesce, who, according to Messina, was a mar- velous diver who explored the bottom of the straits, and according to Vanni was a man who deceived the king, was but another phase, according to Dr. Pitre's folklore studies, of San Nicola, and of Nep- tune, and even of Old Nick of Northern sailors. "How deep is the water over there?" I wondered. "Outside the grotto, six fathoms, perhaps " Vanni was marking "braccie" with outstretched arms when Cola, weary of his namesake, inter- rupted: "In the days of to-day men go under the sea in diving bells ; but as to the past, such tales are fables. Ecco, our floats!" Vanni and I were silent, a little shy before Cola's young wisdom. The Nuovo Sant' Alfio was now under Isola Bella, and just ahead floated another set of cork buoys. We had come to lift traps in search of bait for the larger traps that are set for lobsters. Vanni took my place at the stern; and, fixing in place a small block and wheel, he seized the rope the corks supported, and passed it over the pulley. One hairy leg inside the boat and one outside, his sun-bleached shirt and trousers gray in the growing light, he presented a lean and still sinewy figure as he began to haul. The huge baskets came up slowly. As the first appeared at the water's edge. COLA PESCE 77 he redoubled his efforts, bringing it dripping into the boat, where it stood nearly three feet tall, its funnel-shaped entrance defended against escaping fish by a chevaux de frise of rush ends pointing up from the broad bottom. Unpinning from the thimble top the small round cover, he shook Into the boat a dozen or more of the tiny black fish that are called "little monks." Then, fastening the cover again with wooden pins, he rinsed the hive-shaped trap and tossed It at my feet, the very pattern, perhaps, of Pliny's "osier kipes" for taking "purples" for making dye. But Pliny's traps were baited with cockles. In Vanni's there was nothing. "The little monks do not go in for food," he answered to my query. "They take delight in the traps ; they go in to play. We do not bait them." The little monks did not seem on pleasure bent that morning. One by one Vanni hauled traps until the boat was piled with them, as with a towering load of bubbles ; and still we had taken little — a few monks, a few dozen shrimps, some wee red "ruf- fian!" and half a dozen "coraUI," striped orange, white and green. It was not until nine or ten traps were up that Cola pointed to rising bubbles. "Eels!" he ex- claimed. Vanni was working too hard to speak. He puck- ered his lips as If to whistle. 78 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "The eels do like children with their mouths," explained Cola; "they whistle." Bubble after bubble came to the surface and at last appeared the trap, which held two conger eels, each of six to eight pounds. The last trap should have held an eel, also, but instead there was a hole in its wicker side. "Robber!" said Cola disgustedly. "He ate the monk and then bit out a hole and got away," When the traps were all up, Vanni put them down again one by one, while the boat moved just enough to float them apart, the floats marking as before the end of the long rope on which they were strung. The two fresh traps that swung from the bow-post went down in place of the torn one and another which we carried away to be cleaned and mended. By this time the stars had faded. The dark red streaks in the Eastern sky had paled to pink and gray, and the morning clouds were like delicate wings brushing the sky. In the clear dawn-light the straits narrowed up sharply to the North of us towards Messina, and the saddle of the mountains of Aspromonte was defined to the smallest detail. At one side of us was the rocky Isola Bella, at the other the red marble ridge of Capo Sant' Andrea. Behind us rose the hills of Taormina, parched and brown, more bare and rigid than in winter. The sea was smooth and silvery. As the boat slid leisurely back to the trawl we had left almost an hour earlier, the pink in the COLA PESCE 79 East brightened again until it was saffron. One held one's breath in sharp suspense waiting for the sun. Minute by minute the saffron became more vivid and the waiting more tense, until at last a knife-like gleam flashed above Calabria. "Does the sun come up just the same in your country?" asked Vanni, while we watched the red crescent become a globe and slowly lift itself from the horizon. "They say it is the earth that moves; it does not seem so, but Vossia, who has been in many places and perhaps understands the seven languages of the world, should know." The trawl as Vanni stripped it did not net us many fish. From the four hundred hooks we took not more than half a dozen "uopi," or "bo-opi"; brilliant little eye-shaped fish spotted with red; ox- eyes, according to their name, like those of Hera. "Thieves!" again exclaimed Cola. "The fish eat the bait, and if they don't bite hard, they get away," Turriddu's boat was now again in sight. He had taken in his trolling lines, and we headed out to meet him without bait-fish, for he was ready to haul the lobster pots sunk in deep water. Before we reached him we could see that the trap refused to come. His straining figure silhouetted against sea and sky put forth its strength to no purpose. The powerful current running South from the straits must have twisted a rope, Cola said, under a rock. When we came up with the Madonna della Rocca he stepped aboard of her and took the oars, 8o BY-PATHS IN SICILY pushing at top strength against the tide, while Tur- riddu continued to haul. The cousins were much alike, with the brown skin, straight nose and fine features of Arabs. Cola was much the younger, and his crisp hair, almond eyes and flashing teeth made him as he bent to his work, a swarthy model for a statue of labor. There were sixty fathoms of water under the boat, Vanni said, and it would be hard to free the trap before the tide turned. Vanni measures the depth of water as the Romans used to do, by "brac- cie," though the Roman braccium was under five feet, while nowadays, it has become a fathom. We left the two men at the task and headed south of the island. The men who had been fishing by torch-light had finished their work, and their boats scattered over the sea as far away as Capo Schizo were putting ashore. Over the water came the monotonous, long-drawn wail of their song: ". . . Quantu beddu star cu te. Lasciu patri, Lasciu matri, Lasciu casa Ppi star cu te." At the beach South of Capo di Taormina some twenty men were hauling a "sciabica," a net that may be an eighth of a mile long, and that was ancient in the days of the Phoenicians. As the two files of men, leg-deep in water, pulled in the COLA PESCE 81 red folds and coiled them in heaps on the sand, the boat that had cast the seine followed it to shore. Behind the arms of the net trailed its deep pocket, which as it was drawn up and emptied, seemed to hold but little, though a night or two earlier a net had taken, between sunset and morning, more than twenty-six hundred pounds of anchovies. "To-night, maybe," said Vanni, "they will not take the value of fifteen lire, and of that a third goes to the net. But that is fishermen's luck. I myself have paid ten soldi for bait and taken eleven soldi of fish ; and with one soldo how does one give food to a family ?" He hesitated, then went on : "I am but one, and if I were really to fill myself, I could eat all alone five and a half soldi ; that would be only half a kilo of macaroni. The rich strangers who visit our country pick a little of many things, but we eat all we can get of one or two things — bread and macaroni, or bread and beans. It is only at wed- dings," he finished confidentially, "that we arrive at sweets." As Vanni sent the Nuovo Sant* Alfio in among the rocks that fringe the south side of Isola Bella, he dipped a reed into his oil- jar and let fall on the water a drop or two of oil. Then he put overboard a tangle of net, dragging it across the bottom by the hook on his cane rod, keeping within the circle of the oil mirror. After a little he lifted the net and took out of it, enmeshed by their spines, half 82 BY-PATHS IN SICILY a dozen big brown sea urchins, such as sell two or three for a soldo. "Shall we eat?" he suggested, bringing out the basket with bread and cutting the "fruit of the sea" as one might slice off the top of a lemon. It was a pleasant place to breakfast. Isola Bella lies half way betwene Capo Sant' Andrea and the slate-black crag of the Capo di Taormina, which rose across the little bay to our south, broken into the rugged walls of miniature fiords, rough with jutting rocks, the haunts of rooks and wild pigeons, where even in the morning light the green and violet waves were somber. On the other side of the boat, almost within hand reach, dropped the dark green leaves of a leaning fig tree, rooted in a crevice of the island rock. There was little depth where we floated. At one minute through the crystal-clear, radiant water every breath of the bottom life was visible; at the next the rock reefs were hidden by streamers of many- colored sea weed. High overhead circled swallows. In the air was a clean, pleasant smell of salt and algae. "It's good here," said Vanni. He dipped a last morsel of bread Into the cup of a sea urchin, and picked up again the handful of net and the pole. With the urchins there came up presently a red starfish, Vanni laid it out on a thwart, separating Its five points carefully. COLA PESCE 83 "Fine and red," I commented. "It Is against evil eye." "Yes," he answered reservedly. "You don't believe in the evil eye?" "But, yes," he said, with a considering smile such as he had given to the case of Cola Pesce. Straight- ening his bent figure, he wiped his shaggy eyebrows with a red handkerchief. "Would the priests fumigate the altar and the people if there was no evil eye?" He seemed reasoning with himself as well as me. "The people see the priests swing the censer and they argue about it. They see that the fumigation is against evil eye." "And the starfish " I pursued. The starfish was for my pleasure. I spoke of a door that I passed almost daily, where a horseshoe was nailed between two starfish, and he said that now and then a family that had suffered a misfortune would pay a soldo or two for one large and red. Mothers asked for cowrie shells to hang at the neck of teething babies; papery white sea horses, too, would sometimes bring soldi; but these were not to be had often. We talked of a hundred things — of the dogfish with teeth "like a mule," for fear of which the fishermen dare not nap in the boat In the long sum- mer nights when they are afloat from evening until sunrise ; and of the great tunny, which the Taormina men take at times in open sea, looking well not to get a slap from its tail. And minute by minute 84 BY-PATHS IN SICILY it grew hot even In the shadow of the wild fig trees ; so hot that I had grown sleepy when of a sudden Vanni dropped his cane rod and began to row at full speed out to sea. As the boat shot forward, I strained my eyes to find the object of this chase, but the sea was empty, white and shimmering. It was some minutes before I caught sight of an upstanding black fin. Giving one last powerful shove as we came within striking distance, Vanni dropped the oars ; and, seizing Cola's heavy lance-headed pole, he cast it while the boat shot past what looked like a great black wheel. A streak of blood stained the water, and the wheel began to plunge and wallow. We had speared a huge basking sunfish, better named in the Italian — a "mola," millstone. It was not easy to get It into the boat, for it was more than two feet in diameter, and may have weighed sixty pounds. At last it lay at our feet, to the eye a headless, tailless mass, inchoate but for its big black back and belly fins. Vanni was more elated than he wished to show. The rough shagreen hide was thick and good for nothing, not even for leather, he said. The fish would be two-thirds waste, and the rest would sell for soup; it would fetch no more than a few lire; but as he took a long drink of water from the fat-bellied jug, and headed the boat again inshore, his eyes shone with satisfaction. Cola was the Lobster Pots and Fish Traps The San Pancrazio COLA PESCE 8s cleverest lancer, he boasted, of all Taormina, though when he himself was young Cola could not beat him yet, I protested. Fish were plentier in his young days. As a lad he lanced the mola for sport, he said ; nobody would have eaten it. Did I know the "palamati" — the beautiful young tunny fish all blue and silver ? Years ago the Taormina men caught them as now they catch anchovies, by the boatload; and sold them for good prices. But in the days of to-day when Christians eat meat, even on Fridays, like Turks, the few fish you get you must give away almost for nothing. The Madonna della Rocca was still where we had left her. Cola and Turriddu must have had a hard time freeing the traps, for though the boat was piled high with them, the last were not yet in. "She's all bubbly domes," I said ; "Hke a floating mosque." "A mosque? I don't know," returned Vanni. "When the tramontane wind blows we can't lift traps ; the boat would be carried out to sea." When Cola saw us approaching, he shouted, "You got the mola?" "Yes," replied Vanni, with assumed indifference. "How many lobsters?" "Eight," said Vanni, holding up in each hand a big red lobster, "Are there lobsters in your country, Vossia?" he demanded, as we came alongside. "Ours are green," I said, "before they are cooked." 86 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "Then they are not so beautiful." Turriddu was baiting the last trap. Cola tossed him two or three little monks strung on a rush and he twisted it across the trap on the Inside and pinned down the cover. They would follow us to the beach, they said, as soon as the nasse had been put over- side, stopping on the way for another look at the trawl. As we approached the landing rock we saw fish peddlers waiting with baskets and scales. The fisher- men do not market their own fish, but sell at the water's edge, weighing In balances, each man against his own set of stones. Knives were at work in a minute, hacking the tough black skin off the mola. It was not much past eight o'clock, but sky and sea were white with sclrocco, and the chain of my watch was so hot that It scorched the hand. Their fish disposed of, the men would clean out their boats, light a fire on the beach, cook the remains of their bait fish, if there were any, and eat before going up to Taormlna. I walked along the curve of the tiny beach, for while we were skirting Isola Bella I had noticed through an opening in the rocks, a pocket overgrown with acanthus; and I had a mind to have a closer look at the flowers. It hardly costs a foot-wetting to pass the ford that makes the broken rock an island. Split by storm and sun, eaten by the waves, Isola Bella Is fantastic, a caprice of nature. There COLA PESCE 87 is only a handful of it, and it rises not many meters above the water, but its crags and precipices, its beaches and caverns, are as picturesque as they are lilliputian. The little refuge it afforded from the heat was rock shade, for the scanty leafage of its sea-gray olive trees allowed the sun to pass almost without hindrance. In a cleft of the rock grew an aloe with a flower shoot twenty feet tall and thick as a young tree. Beyond this in a tangled glade surrounded by a thick scrub of resin-scented "scornabeccu" — the lentisk of Theocritus — rioted acanthus. The spikes of its white, purple-veined flowers rose above my head, mixed with Queen Anne's lace — wild car- rots. I do not know how long I had dallied, dreading the hot climb to Taormina, when there came a mut- ter of thunder. At sea level, rain in June is almost a prodigy. Under the rock parapet that skirts the shore it was impossible to see Etna, the barometer; but over the sea the sky had grown threatening. Cola and Vanni were still at the beach, and I hurried back to the fish house, taking a stool in the doorway to await developments. To my query, "Is water coming?" Vanni an- swered, "With difficulty." Ammazzacarusi was of a different opinion. His nickname, "Boykiller," handed down from who knows what incident, through who knows how many generations, belied the mild, white-haired old fisher- 88 BY-PATHS IN SICILY man whose boat, the Santa Liberata, was drawn up beside Cola's. Glancing at the purple and gray cloud masses through which the sun still managed to dart an occasional beam, he said gloomily: 8 "June rain ; Ruin in train." "In my country," I ventured, "summer rains arc good for the crops." Patiently, painstakingly, speaking each in turn, they explained to me that this is impossible. Warm slow scirocco rains mildew the flowers of the olive and the vine, while the hail that comes with a thunderstorm cuts whatever it touches. If in my country it rained often in summer, how could any crops be raised? "You understand?" concluded Vanni. I assented, though I had scarcely listened. I was studying the pictures on Occhietti's boat. He had come ashore before us at daylight, and had left the San Pancrazio nearer the fish house than any other of the dozen boats in line, so that I could measure her against the tubby Taormina craft and see that she was ten feet longer than our boats, though smaller at that than many of her build at Catania, where the barche mostly carry sails. But it was her shining colors that caught my eyes — ^her checker-board sides gleaming in yellow, red ^Acqua di Giugnu Ruvina lu munnu. COLA PESCE 89 and green. At one side of her curved bow-post was painted our black San Pancrazio, at the other his companion of Taormina, San Pietro. Her short stern-post carried San Giorgio, young and valiant; and, backed against him, a group of souls in the streaming flames of purgatory. Under the right bow Agramonti led a file of crusaders; under the left, Italian soldiers of to-day who fought in Tripoli. At the stern a fight between lion and gladiator vied with Judith cutting off the head of a limp and bloody Holofernes. Rows of cherubs enlivened the free- board on the inside. Most fascinating of all were the San Pancrazio's eyes. Since the days when Egyptian lords voyaged in painted barges on the Nile, boats have had eyes against the evil eye. At Siracusa the blue-painted boats that cross the Porto Piccolo wear pictured horns against witchcraft, as well as eyes with queer looped brows. At Catania there are boats with sharp protruding beaks like those of swordfish, and the eyes of these are round and fishy. But the eyes of the San Pancrazio, with winking lids and bushy brows, were grotesquely human. "Fine, eh?" said Ammazzacarusi, noting my gaze. I had scarcely answered, "Very beautiful ! Even in the darkest night the San Pancrazio sees !" when there came forked lightning and a rattle of hail. Vanni was whittling pins for fastening the covers of his traps. The sight of his knife and of his figure 90 BY-PATHS IN SICILY in the doorway blotted out the boats and brought back to mind a June storm of the year before. In memory I saw myself sitting in the doorway of the church of the Madonna della Rocca at Cas- tiglione on the slope of Etna. Beside me there had been a bent little man who walked slowly with a stick. Behind us above the altar, smiled one of Gaggini's soft, smooth Madonnas, a golden chain falling between her hands. In front, I looked out on gray and yellow roofs of tumbled tiles pelted with hail. The bells of many churches were tolling. Of a sudden there had come a blinding flash, and the old sacristan had shrunk behind the worm-eaten, iron-bossed door, tottering forward again after a minute and peering into the blackness to spy out the direction of the squall. I could see again his shaking arm as, opening a knife, he signed with it in air three great crosses, finishing with a furious stab towards the wind, his lips moving, his faded ayes agleam. "That is a prayer?" I asked; every "scongiuro" goes by the name of prayer. "Yes," he answered ; "to cut the squall." He had evaded telling me the words of the charm ; an incantation is not taught to a passing stranger. "Three Fathers, three Sons, and three Holy Ghosts" was all I could coax out of him. But later, when the weather had lifted and his rheumatic old wife hobbled into the church and he had asked her with COLA PESCE 91 a man's superior smile, "Wert thou frightened?" he turned to me with pride, saying: "The knife cut it; you saw. I have more than eighty-two years, I have seen many "things and I know much that I tell to no one." "What did the knife cut?" I persisted. "The dragon's tail," he had said concisely. Water- spouts, whirlwinds and sometimes hail clouds are dragons because of their tails. "The malignant spirit," his wife had added. *Fraser says that the South Slavonian peasant shoots at hail clouds in order to bring down the hags that are in them ; but for these two old Sicilians I fancied that the dragon itself was the evil spirit — had some such personality as had the south wind for the Psylli who, Herodotus says, went out to fight it because it had dried up their reservoirs. Thinking of these things as I watched Vanni's knife, while we sat in the doorway of the fish house, I asked him if he knew a 'razioni to drive away the hail, or to cut the tail of the waterspout that so often on these coasts brings terror to fishermen. "No," he said. "There are such 'razioni and they are useful, for there is peril In storm ; but I do not know anybody who is skilled in them." The scudding clouds dropped showers here and there over the sea, but on our beach there fell little water, and after no long time I was rising for the 4 "Balder the Beautiful." Vol. i, p. 345. 92 BY-PATHS IN SICILY homeward climb when Ammazzacarusi lifted his brown weazened face with a friendly smile. "If it is true," he said, "that before long Vossia must cross the sea to her own country, this knowl- edge would be useful to her. There is one who cuts the tail of the dragon for us; she is Filippa 'a Babba." I thanked him, asked to have the lobsters brought up for me by the long way past the octroi, and took the shorter path. It was not until next morning that I went to find Filippa 'a Babba, who is Filippa the Idiot — only by the sort of inheritance that makes Ammazza- carusi the Boykiller. Filippa must live in the short Via le Mura; but who wants her seeks her at the wall above the old steep road that comes up from Giardini past the chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie ; a perch commanding every man, woman and ass that climbs out of the valley and giving a broad outlook over the sea. It was at the wall that I found her with two or three comari, putting a black patch into a blue apron. In presence of the other women I did not venture questions about whirlwinds or waterspouts, but con- tented myself with looking at the light smoke which rose idly from the black cone of Etna. The rain of the day before had been heavy on the mountain, for a long yellow tongue of roiled water streamed from the mouth of Alcantara, and on sea and slope the play of blues and greens was COLA PESCE 93 as vivid as in winter. The air was so still that the lemon gardens of Capo Schizo were doubled in the water. One of the comari who sat on the gray round- topped wall was knitting the sole of a stocking for her husband in America. I picked up the leg which had lain at her side. "Why is it?" she asked, "that in your country stockings make themselves in one piece?" "Why do they make themselves here in two pieces?" I countered. Comare Lia smiled indulgently at my ignorance. "One knows," she said, "that an American stocking is good for little because when the foot is worn one must throw the whole away. With us when the sole is gone one throws away only the sole. One unsews it and puts in a new one." "But who will sew extra feet into the stockings of your husband in America?" "Who knows?" returned Lia so soberly that I was glad to hear the melancholy call of a peddler "The lupine man is passing!" which broke up the party. In the Via le Mura there had appeared the scraggy mule of an old peasant who comes to town with saddle-bags full of lupines, soaked till they are sodden to take out their bitterness, and from the doorways flocked women with plates and bits of paper, bargaining for one soldo's worth, or two. Even when Filippa and I were left alone together, 94 BY-PATHS IN SICILY we gossiped of twenty things before I had courage to say "dragon" to the plump comfortable looking old body whom I had associated always with clean- ing and fine ironing. But she told me readily enough that an old fisherman had taught her grandmother how to cut the tail of the dragon. "Sometimes when there is bad weather," she said, "the water goes up and up to meet the sky, and the sky comes down, down to meet the water, to destroy boats and trees and houses. But if you do as I shall tell you, the water will fall and the tempest become calm. "You must take a white-handled knife of the sort used in pruning the vine shoots; wait," she said, "I will show you." She hurried away up the street and came back after a minute bringing some of the dried vine cut- tings that are used for firing and a knife so small that I asked if my white-handled penknife would not answer. "Perhaps?" she said, looking at It doubtfully. "You must sign three crosses in air," she con- tinued, turning towards the sea, knife in one hand, a bit of vine in the other; and making three sweep- ing crosses such as I had seen at Castiglione. "And you must say: "Whither goest thou, ugly fate?" " 'I go to a bourne lone and far, Where never singeth hen, Nor shineth moon or star.' COLA PESCE 95 "There drop the water without wrong. Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I cut the tail; remains the song." As she reached the words, "I cut the tail," she slashed the vine shoot viciously. "You have a knife," she concluded; "do you wish that I give you some vine shoots to take on board ship when you go to your own country ?" CHAPTER IV The Cleft Oak In a farmyard near the middle of this village stands at this time a row of pollard ashes which by the seams and cicatrices down their sides manifestly show that in former times they have been cleft asunder. These trees when young and flexible were severed and held open by wedges while ruptured children, stripped naked, were pushed through the apertures under a persuasion that by such a process the poor babes would be cured of their infirmity. As soon as the operation was over the tree in the suffering part was plastered with loam and carefully swathed up. If the part coalesced and soldered together, as usually fell out where the feat was performed with any adroitness at all, the party was cured; but where the cleft continued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, would prove ineffectual. — Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selboiirne," letter 28, Jan. 1776. For a day or two after the festa my neighbors along the Via BagnoH Croce talked of little but Sant' Alfio. The greatest miracle of the day, they agreed, had been worked for the dumb child in blue whom we had seen weeping at the altar. In the church she had not spoken ; but later, on the car of the saints, she had said, "The bells of Sant' Alfio are ringing." One or two of the people claimed to have been near enough to hear her voice. 96 THE CLEFT OAK 97 "Now Vossia knows," they said with satisfaction; "now she has seen with her own eyes." I was standing among a group of women at the door of Zu Saru, a bronzed fisherman who sat mend- ing a fish-trap plaited of rushes. "Are there any Taormina children," I inquired, "whom Sant' Alfio has liberated?" "But yes," said Zu Saru's wife, Lucia, who is blue-eyed like her husband, and whose yellow hair is sun-bleached to the color of tow. Her tone was one of surprise. "Here is Vincenzinu of Cumari Tidda. He was ruptured, and Sant' Alfio did the miracle two years ago." Vincenzinu is Gna Vanna Pipituna's grandson. He was then a thin, silent four-year-old, brown as a Moor, with big, sober bright eyes. Zu Saru dropped the trap and caught him as he trotted clumsily past, riding a stick, and pulled up his one garment to show that his flesh was whole and smooth. So it happened that when I passed Gna Vanna's door, and she called me inside to see the naked, uneasy chicks which her two white pigeons had hatched in their nest behind the bed, I inquired of her about Vincenzinu. She, too, caught the solemn youngster by his petticoat, and bribed him with green almonds to stand still for exhibition. It was not true, she said, that Vincenzinu owed his liberation to Sant' Alfio. Tidda had indeed taken him to Trecastagne not only once but two 98 BY-PATHS IN SICILY years in succession. He had lain on the vara, and his father had sent money from New York to buy a two-pound wax candle. She herself had given a white kid, the one she had called "the little flower." But the saint did nothing. Tidda, her daughter-in- law, had been in despair. "But I understand such things," she concluded; "I said we must wait till the vigilia of San Giovanni." Gna Vanna was cleaning hens' heads to make broth for Vincenzinu's sister, who was ill. She had bought three heads for three soldi and three "in- teriori" for five soldi, and was so scandalized at the high cost of living that she wandered from the subject. "Bad Christians!" she ejaculated, three red combs dangling as she shook three necks venomously. "Bad Christians who ask so much from me ! I am a poor unfortunate! I have no father; mother I have not; I have no one. I go barefoot, I must live. I cannot pay so much." The orphan planted the tip of a long, lean old forefinger in the middle of her forehead, the gesture that calls attention to right ways of thinking; and her pale, keen eyes snapped as she appealed to me; "Vossia persuades herself? Do I speak well?" "But the vigilia of San Giovanni?" I suggested. "San Ciuvanuzzu? Ah, si; Vincenzinu. We passed him over the tree." "Over the tree? You made Vincenzinu pass over the tree?" I thought I had not heard correctly. THE CLEFT OAK 99 "Yes, through the trunk of an oak." "Through the trunk of an acorn tree? Did pass- ing through an oak make Vincenzinu well ?" "Of course!" It is often Gna Vanna's pleasure to assure me, when speaking of the spells and charms which she calls prayers, "These things I know; no one else knows them, no one at all; and I tell them only to you. When I die no one in the world except you will know them. Daughter I have not ; you are my heir." As one thought worthy to pass the old wisdom on, I seldom express surprise at any revelation. In the matter of the oak tree I asked, as if the answer were a matter of course, "At midnight?" "Yes ; down at the shore." She told me at some length how she and her daughter-in-law, and a party of friends had taken the ruptured child down to the shore at Isola Bella, where they had made a slit through a young oak, and then under her direction had passed him three times through the gash. "Three times they made him enter." Then they tied up the tree and ate and drank toasts as if it had been a baptismal festa. Vincenzinu slept under the tree, and in the morning he felt better. After a year they had visited the oak and had found it healthy and grown together. Vincenzinu's hurt had grown together also; he was no longer ruptured. loo BY-PATHS IN SICILY "I wish you had told me at the time," I said; "I should have liked to go with you." Gna Vanna promised that if ever she heard of another child who needed to pass through the tree, she would tell me in season; but the twenty-third of June came and went, and I heard nothing more about the matter. I learned by inquiry that this old, old cure by sympathetic magic is still well known in Eastern Sicily. My landlady gossiped to me about a neighbor who had been subjected to it in childhood, but who nevertheless had not been sound enough to do his military service. The ceremony seemed not uncommon, but I had given up hope of ever seeing it when, a year later at the approach of San Giovanni, Gna Vanna beckoned me mysteri- ously inside her door one morning to announce that only the night before her services had been spoken for in behalf of a lad, whose parents had not been able to take him to Trecastagne. She had already sent a message to her cumpari, Vanni Nozzulu, John of the olive stone, to ask if he would help her, as he had done in the case of Vincenzinu. Would I really like to make one of the party? The Sicilian ritual requires that the ruptured child be handed through the tree by a man and woman who "make their names" on St. John's day ; that is, who are called Giovanni and Giovanna. Gna Vanna's repute as a witch makes her an especially appropriate Jane to act as mistress of such a ceremony. THE CLEFT OAK loi I did not accept at once my invitation, though I did not doubt Vanna's good faith. Whether she or her compare, or the parents of the child had any substantial faith in the ancient formula they pro- posed to repeat, who could know? That the force of tradition, dying but not dead, would make the experiment seem to them perhaps useful, certainly not harmful, was beyond question. I held acceptance in reserve only to make sure that nothing should be added to the function or taken away from it be- cause of the expected presence of an outsider. From day to day Gna Vanna chatted of the preparations. This time they were going into the hills, not down to the shore. Petru Barbarussa, the boy's father, had already found a likely tree. It would be moonlight ; they would take bread, cheese and fish, and make a supper after the ceremony. Cumpari Vanni would bring wine. In the late after- noon of the twenty-third she reported that every- thing was ready, except the supper; she would like to give that herself ; "but I am scarce" she concluded with a shrewd eye-glance. It was then that I agreed to come and to supplement her scarceness of money, if she would buy for me the peas, beans, nuts and seeds necessary to complete the festa. Peter of the Red Beard is a fisherman. His Pippinu I had known from the child's babyhood. Pippinu was at this time a white, sickly sprout of a six-year-old, red-headed, pale-eyed, ill-fed; yet withal an ingratiating little soul. When I stopped I02 BY-PATHS IN SICILY hesitatingly at his door at nine o'clock that evening his shy grin of welcome made me even more ashamed than I had expected to be of gratifying curiosity at the expense of such a weakly mite of humanity. Pippinu lives at the foot of the broad "ladder" that goes up from a confusion of narrow ways to the street known of all tourists, the Via Teatro Greco. His is the usual house of one room, its smoky wall lighted only from the doorway, its floor of broken bricks littered with water jars, brambles for the fire, confused heaps of nets and dingy house- hold utensils. Gna Vanna had not yet come, and in the dim interior Barbarussa, a gaunt man of forty with a red stubble beard, barefooted, wearing cotton shirt and trousers, was preparing lanterns, ropes and the like for our excursion. Donna Catina, Pippinu's mother, was putting down children for the night; two boys on one side of the room, two girls on the other, the pallets partly screened by ragged sacking. The big mar- riage bed stood as usual in an alcove at the back, cut off by worn red curtains. There was not much other furniture: Two small tables, a chest, chairs, a washtrough full of soapy water, a rack holding bottles and dishes, prints of the Madonna and saints, family clothing. Donna Catina was pretty once; she might be pretty now, if her straggling hair were ever combed and her untidy dress were ever buttoned at the THE CLEFT OAK 103 throat. She is not yet thirty, but her oval face is thin and faded, and her smile flickers anxiously. While we waited, she showed me by the light of an ill-smelling lamp the two treasures of the household, a "snapshot" of 'her husband's first wife taken by some tourist, and a wax image of the baby Christ, framed in a wooden box with a glass front. At last Cumpari Vanni appeared, a rugged con- tadino, better-nourished than the others. His straw hat was so huge it interfered with the big basket he carried on his shoulder. Behind him came Gna Vanna, limping with a touch of rheumatism, and Pippinu's aunt. Donna Ciccia, whose good brown face, framed in its yellow kerchief, beamed in an- ticipation of the adventure. When our party of seven started at ten o'clock, the moon was not up ; and, once outside the village, we lighted two square lanterns not bigger than water glasses. Our way took us past the Messina gate and then down beyond the Campo Santo into a rough path that dips into a fold of the hills, a short- cut to the shore north of Taormina, It was a black descent; the circle of mountains almost cut out the sky. There was not a breath of air. The hot earth exhaled an aromatic smell of pennyroyal. The two men walked ahead, talking in low tones of the scarcity of fish, of the drought, of the light wheat crop. Donna Catina came behind them with Pippinu clinging mute and frightened to her hand. Next came Donna Ciccia with the second lantern. I04 BY-PATHS IN SICILY flashing it now and then to discover a sprig of the tall-growing shrub; "for the presepio," she said. Pennyroyal gathered and dried on the eve of San Giovanni blossoms fresh at Christmas. Gna Vanna grasped my arm, groaning, "My leg hurts enough and too much. I cannot walk. I cannot sleep. There has gone from me the love of eating. To-day I cooked myself one soldo's worth of spaghetti, one soldo's worth and nothing more. I want to die, for I cannot suffer any more." She interrupted her lament to point out a big toad that hopped across our path, calling it a good omen ; then went on, "They call me lame, I who, Vossia knows, have always walked better than any of them." And she stepped out so vigorously that with difficulty I kept up with her After perhaps half an hour we dropped the basket under a big walnut tree, left the path, and began scrambling up the parched mountain side. It was a familiar slope, where in autumn blossom narcissus, cyclamen and Jack-in-the-pulpit, which Sicilian children call the pipe; but in the blackness I could not recognize.a landmark. Barbarussa had come by daylight to choose us an oak, but Gna Vanna refused to accept the gnarled, stunted little tree he had pitched upon. Though small, it was old, and would not augur long life for Pippinu. The men climbed higher while we women clung together. A screech owl hooted ; Gna Vanna crossed herself, and Donna Ciccia muttered, "Beautiful THE CLEFT OAK 105 Mother of the Rock, deliver us!" Donna Catina touched something in the bosom of her dress. After a long wait the men came back. They had found a better oak, but high on a cliff side so steep that without Gna Vanna's help I should have been slow in reaching it. "My leg hurts," she mourned, as she dragged me up the baked and crumbly steep. There was no vegetation but bunches of a wiry grass on which the feet slipped, and which cut the hands. The new oaklet stood on a narrow shelf with a few dwarf fichi dTndia and wild plum trees above, and at one side a recently planted baby olive. It may have been four feet tall, a straight slender stem carrying at top two waving brushes of the small, close-growing, much indented leaves of the Sicilian oak. We sat down beside it. It was not yet half-past eleven; nothing could be done until midnight. To save oil for our return we put out the lanterns, and stuck a candle atop of a stone under the oak, whose dark glossy leaves rustled without wind as if it shivered before coming pain. Pippinu went to sleep in his mother's arms. The yellow point of candle flame made blacker the black outlines of Monte Ziretto and Monte Veneretta that loomed silent on the opposite side of the ravine. There was no sound but the sleepy "Frisci, frisci, frisci" of a belated cicala. "What does the cicaledda say?" I asked. io6 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "I am wrong, I die," answered Donna Ciccia; and she told us the tale of the idle cicala and the in- dustrious ant, as she had heard it from her elders; as they heard it from their "ancients" ; for on the lips of the South some of the old Greek tales have never died. The silence that fell again was broken by the hoot of the cucca. "Some one must die," shuddered Donna Catina. "The cicaledda," suggested Vanni. Gna Vanna settled her bad leg more comfortably, announcing, "When there passes the pain in my leg, I shall carry two candles to the dear Madonna of the Chain." She told us again how Vincenzinu, her grandson, had passed "over the little oak" and how much better he had felt the next morning, Vincenzinu's father, Turiddu, who had made already two voyages to New York, was about to sail again. "He says," she continued, "that they call our cucuzzi 'squashes' ; is it true, Vossia ?" I praised Turiddu's English, and confirmed his tales of "treni in aria" and "treni suttu terra" — elevated and subway trains. Turiddu had told his mother that in America one does not enjoy life, for there is no music in the piazza on Sunday. The air, too, is not so fine as in Sicily, and the fish have not the same good taste. "That would be true," said Barbarussa, "for even the fish taken at Catania, one hour from here, have THE CLEFT OAK 107 not the same good taste as the fish of our own sea of Taormina." A few minutes before twelve by Cumpari Vanni's watch Gna Vanna gave the signal for us to sign ourselves with the cross. Then the party repeated in unison three paternosters, three aves and three gloria patris. When these were finished Cumpari Vanni took the little tree by its two poor leafy branches, and slowly and dexterously split it with his hands. To use a knife, Gna Vanna said, would be unlucky. When he had opened it two-thirds of the way to the ground, he put one side of the top into my hands and the other side into Barbarussa's. By traditional usage this made me cumari — co-mother — with the parents of Pippinu. We stood North and South of the oak. Pippinu began to whine as his mother delivered him, cold and sleepy, to Gna Vanna, who unbuttoned and pulled off his short patched breeches. Custom prescribes that the child be naked; but Pippinu's screams became so shrill, and his thin, dusty legs waved so protestingly that she left him his shirt and cuddled him, cold, sleepy and afraid, in her old arms, promising sweets to eat in the morning. She had taken off her white headkerchief, and the yellow hoops of her earrings gleamed in the flicker- ing candle light that brought nose and chin gro- tesquely close together. She would have looked a witch, if she had not looked a good grandmother. io8 BY-PATHS IN SICILY The split in the tree ran East and West. When Pippinu's sobs had subsided into disconsolate little chokes, Cumari Vanni and Cumpari Vanni placed themselves in front of it and behind, making a cross with Barbarussa and me. Then Vanna, holding out the boy, began: "Cumpari Vanni!" He answered, "Cumari Vanna!" "Cumpari Vanni!" "Cumari Vanna, What do you wish?" Vanna replied: ^Pigghia stu figghiu E lu passa cca banna; A nomu di Sanciuvanni, Lu dugnu ruttu, dammilu sanu. At the word "pigghia" Gna Vanna passed Pip- pinu feet first across the split betwen the two halves of the tree into the hands of Vanni, who, when he had received him, began in his turn, "Cumari Vanna!" They repeated the formula until Pippinu had passed from one to the other through the tree three times. There was no attempt to be impressive and nothing like jesting. They made a plain work- ing conversation. When Vanna had received the child back for the last time, she set him on his feet, still frightened ^ Take this child and pass him back to me again ; In the name of San Giovanni, I give him you broken, give him me sound. The Little Oak Tree THE CLEFT OAK 109 and shivering, a wee pathetic smile dawning on his face. Holding him at her side, her hands on his shoulders, she finished her incantation : Praised and thanked be the most holy Sacrament, the great Mother of God, Mary, and all the (heavenly) company. San Giovanni, in the name of Jesus close this flesh. In the name of Jesus, blessed San Giovanni, close this hurt; and may Pippinu suffer nothing more. Take away all the peril and the evil suggestion, dear good San Giovanni. Praised and thanked be the most holy Sacrament, the great Mother of God, Mary and all the heavenly company! - A little dazed, the child wavered across to his mother, who dressed him while Cumpari Vanni bound up the tree, winding the new rope that Bar- barussa had provided in a continuous coil to cover the entire length of the slit, while he and Vanna repeated together: "As this tree closes, so may Pippinu's rupture close." If the tree healed within a year, Vanna said, Pippinu would heal ; if not, Pippinu would not get well. Vanna does not know how passage through the tree was to help Pippinu. To her, Gaidoz, whose monograph aims to prove the root idea to be a shift- ing of trouble from Pippinu to the tree ; or Frazer, who thinks that an escaping Pippinu leaves a pur- suing malady caught in the cleft; or Baring Gould, who sees a new Pippinu reborn free of old ills, would be equally meaningless. She does not need to speculate about the matter; she has inherited a no BY-PATHS IN SICILY practice that comes down to her perhaps from the elder Cato, who advised that a green spHt reed be tied to a dislocated limb during the recitation of a spell, the two then being tied together to heal in sympathetic harmony. Vanna's invocation is a prayer. People call her a witch, but they are wrong, since she works only "things of God." Many a time she has said to me, **It is always for good and never for ill. Release (from evil) yes; bind, never! Am I a Christian, or am I not?" If the priests do not approve of certain practices, it is because the priests have not the devotion. Her thought does not separate religion and magic; each is an appeal to superior powers; but in daily life, since the priests refuse to make appeals of various necessary sorts, wise people must make them, or cause them to be made, for themselves. After rendering first aid to the oak, we slipped and slid down the hillside to the path, where under the walnut tree we laid out the baptismal supper. Barbarussa had brought three big round brown loaves of bread, a few early figs and a plate of little cold fried fish, and Cumpari Vanni had added a small form of sheep's milk, cheese and two bottles of wine. Vanni cut the bread with his evil-looking knife. We hung our lanterns to the thorn bushes and ate with satisfaction. Gna Vanna had not for- gotten the feast. It was time for tlie moon to be up ; this we knew THE CLEFT OAK iii by a faint light above the mountain tops; but she never gave a real look into our cup among the hills. My new honor as godmother gave me the first easy time-worn toast : * Good and fine is this wine ; A toast to Pippinu, this is mine. Pippinu's father followed with the second: Good as bread is this wine; Vanni made it from his vine. I have yet to see the Sicilian who could not rhyme toasts as long as breath held out. Dawn was in the sky before we reached home. As we climbed out of the gorge Donna Catina stopped to touch the ground, and then kissed her fingers, saying, "I kiss the earth; God save us from traveling again this fearsome road." She opened the bosom of her dress to show me, stitched into her clothing, the flat thin gold cross she had worn as protection against the evil spirits that infest the night, "You and I saw the botta, Vossia," said Vanna, shaking her wise old head reassuringly; "that toad may have been a 'donna di fora,' one of the little people." Within a few days I left Sicily, and it was more than a year before I saw Pippinu again. Time had ^ Chistu vinu e beddu e finu, Facciu brindisi a Pippinu. 112 BY-PATHS IN SICILY not changed the house at the foot of the great scalinata, except that, hung to the side of the bed in the alcove, was now a cradle, made of a piece of sacking that swung by ropes from the bedf rame. Donna Catina was not at home. Barbarussa said she had gone "To make the day's expenses (for provisions)." More gaunt and good-humored than ever, he was sweeping the floor. *T am making the cleaning of the house," he added, explaining an occupation not unusual among the fishermen. . After a few minutes Catina appeared carrying in her arms the tenant of the cradle, ten-months-old Giovanninu, named for the saint we had invoked when his brother passed over the tree. "Four teeth he has," she said proudly, as soon as we had ex- changed greetings, prying open the youngster's mouth to show me his four new teeth. "He creeps, and he can stand alone." She coaxed him to smile, smoothing his red hair, tapping his plump rosy cheeks. He was indeed a fine boy compared with his thin hungry-looking sisters, grown too large to be nourished with their mother's milk. "But where is Pippinu?" I asked finally. "At the cobbler's," said the little girls in chorus, darting from the house to fetch him. My godson, being now seven years old, had be- come one of the men of the household. He was apprenticed to a cobbler, who, being cumpari with Barbarussa, asked no fee, and sometime would pay THE CLEFT OAK 113 wages. Meantime he did not give food, as seemed obvious when Pippinu sidled bashfully into the room, white and frail as always. • While the children were gone Catina had been rummaging in the big wooden chest to find the certificate of Pippinu's marks in the Taormina school. He had finished the second elementary class, and pointed out with small leather-stained fingers how well he had done in reading and writing. Would he ever go to school again? Perhaps; they hoped he might go one more year. That afternoon Pippinu's aunt went with me to inspect the tree. It was not the first excursion Donna Ciccia and I had made together, and I do not know a better companion. Her brown, leathery face and sun-strained eyes, her brows arched in a perpetual question, bear witness that life has not handled her gently ; but to every buffet she opposes a jest. I have never seen her wear shoes, though she saved money for months to buy a pair for mass on Sundays. She says the cobbler — ^he to whom Pippinu is apprenticed — made them too tight; per- haps her good muscular feet rebelled at confinement. Even for this visit of ceremony, she left them in her chest, that family hold-all. It was late July. For that very afternoon Hesiod might have written of the summer resting time, "When the artichoke flowers, and the tuneful cicala, perched on a tree, pours forth a shrill song ofttimes from under his wings." The white smoke 114 BY-PATHS IN SICILY of Etna rose straight and slow into a white and cloudless sky. The sea was blue-white. There was a bluish haze over all the world. It was a day of powerful heat, when the stones baked under foot, and the long walls scorched the hand. Even in the rock shade of the fold among the hills the leaves of the almond trees were turning yellow before the fruit had ripened, and the thick fleshy leaves of the fichi d'lndia were drooping. We found the little tree still wound tightly. It showed a long, dark scar well closed. Its crown of leaves was thick and vigorous. It had grown a trifle, was more than four feet tall. It held its head up courageously in face of the scorched moun- tains opposite, which showed their bleakest summer aspect. The drought for a year had been extreme. Again there was nothing green under foot; the air was heavy with the pungent smell of pennyroyal. We rested in the warm silence. The air was so still we might have thought Pan had not yet waked from his siesta. Donna Ciccia pulled her knitting work out of the pockets of her apron, and I read to her the words of the goatherd in Theocritus: "We may not pipe in the noontide; 't is Pan we dread, who truly at this hour rests weary from the chase." By and by Donna Ciccia dropped her needles. "I used to come here when I was a girl," she said, "to pick up wood. Nowadays my Christian has a THE CLEFT OAK 115 vote, but they have not left us any place to pick up wood." Again for a long time v^^e said nothing. In one of her pockets she had brought green almonds ; with her strong teeth she cracked them easily. It was nearly five o'clock, and there was a faint air stirring, when we rose to begin the homeward road. We knew the hour because on the path below fishermen were going down to the sea. • "The tree has come good, it is healed," said Donna Ciccia. We did not take off the cord, lest Pippinu should take off his bandage. It has been agreed that while the tree wore a truss Pippinu should wear one also. "It has come good," she repeated ; "but as to Pippinu one does not yet know." But perhaps when he is older, a little surgery may help us find out about Pippinu. CHAPTER V The Hairy Hand Fel Fi! Fol Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman ! Be he 'live or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread! The moon was coming up large and round over the shoulder of Monte Tauro. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine. The summer evening was peaceful and still. *Tf the war lasts " said the Signora L , drawing forward a chair for me in the doorway of her shop. She did not finish the sentence, but I knew she was thinking, "there will be no tourists next winter, and no work." Donna Peppina's Mazza, trudging homeward from vespers, paused a minute to say, *T have taken the holy benediction !" Her brown, wrinkled face expressed well-considered self-satisfaction. "But — ■ what is that? Thunder?" "Cannon," answered the Signora. It was that August evening when the German ships, Breslau and Goeben, leaving the port of Mes- sina, ran the gauntlet of the French and British fleets. Not two hours earlier we had watched the silent passage, one by one, of dark, low war-vessels. Ii6 THE HAIRY HAND 117 "A verra?" pursued Donna Peppina. "Is it the war? It can't last long." But the tone was not as cheerful as the words, and the little bent figure, muffled in its black shawl, hurried uneasily away. A neighbor's child sat down at our feet, stuffing her fingers into her ears, as from the quiet, moon- lighted water there came another sullen boom, "Sarina," I suggested, "ask the Signora to tell us a story." The Signora smiled indulgently. In those tragic days we whiled away with stories many an evening. She thought a minute, following with her eyes a man who was hurrying supperward, carrying cracked ice on a folded kerchief. Then she began, "When I was a little girl in Caltagirone and my grandmother used to tell me stories, the one I liked best of all was 'The Hairy Hand.' " "Once upon a time there was a poor man who had four daughters. Every morning he went into the country to gather soup greens to sell. When summer came and the great sun burnt the country bare, the poor man's children must have died of hunger, had not the neighbors given them sometimes a glass of wine, sometimes a little oil, sometimes a bit of bread. "One day when the poor father had found noth- ing at all to put into his shoulder bags except a few wild blackberries, he saw in the field on the other side of a hedge of fichi d'India a fine plant of wild fennel. He scrambled through the thorny ii8 BY-PATHS IN SICILY hedge, but no sooner had he reached out his hand to gather the most beautiful plant than he heard, *Cing-a-li ! Cling-a-li ! Cing-a-li !' a sound as of some- thing dropping. He looked with all his eyes, but could see nothing. He pulled again, and again he heard, 'Cing-a-li! Cling-a-li! Cing-a-li!' as if a little bell were ringing or money dropping. He looked again, but could find nothing. The third time he pulled the plant up by the roots, and he saw a hole which grew and grew until it became the mouth of a great cave and out of the cave there came a giant fierce and monstrous. He was a wicked dragon, who killed every person that passed and ate the flesh. If he was not hungry, he would cut off head and hands and throw the body into a great locked room. "At first the dragon did not see the poor father. He stood in the mouth of the cave and said: What a good smell of Christian meat! If it I see, I'll swallow it neat! "The poor father said, 'Give me your blessing, your Excellency.' "Then the dragon said, 'Come in, good man; sit down.' "The poor father went into the cave and looked about. He saw rich furniture and bags of money. 'Eat,' said the dragon, 'if you are hungry; eat as much as you like' ; and he set out bread, wine, pasta, cheese and fish. THE HAIRY HAND 119 "When the poor man had eaten, the dragon asked, 'Where do you come from, good man?' 'The man said he had been gathering minestra to support his family. ** *Are you single or married ?' " *I have four daughters,' replied the poor father. " 'Four daughters !' said the dragon. 'I have no- body; I live alone.' He asked the poor father to give him a daughter to be his wife, promising that she should have plenty to eat and fine clothes to wear, and he gave him a fistful of gold. "The poor father promised to bring his eldest daughter next day, then he said, 'I salute you; I kiss your Excellency's hand' ; and he went home. "That night he showed his four daughters the money. 'Eat,' he said; 'eat, my children, if you are hungry; eat as much as you like.' He told his eldest daughter that a prince had asked for her hand in marriage, and next morning he took her with him to the cave. The drau received him kindly and gave the poor father another fistful of gold. "When the man had gone home the dragon gave the girl the keys of all the rooms in the cave, telling her she was mistress of the place to do what she pleased, except that one door she must not unlock; he pointed towards the great dark room where he kept the bodies of the men he had slain. Then he called, 'Hairy Hand!' " 'What do you want ?' replied a voice, and there appeared a great hairy hand. It was black and 120 BY-PATHS IN SICILY knotted, and its fingers were like the claws of * " The Signora hesitated. Sarina gulped with sus- pense. She no longer heard the sullen booming from the sea. "Like the claws of the one that dances," continued the Signora finally ; "the claws of a bear." " *Do you see the hairy hand?' asked the dragon. 'You have to eat it. If you eat it, you shall be my wife; if you don't eat it, woe to you! I shall cut off your head. Will you eat it?' " *Yes, I will eat it/ said the eldest daughter. " *I give you three days,' said the dj-au, and he went away. The dragon had vast estates; he was always busy traveling through his properties. "When she was alone, the eldest daughter looked at the hairy hand. 'How ugly it is!' she said to herself ; 'I am afraid ; this thing I cannot eat.* She hid it in a big chest, and went about the work of the house. On the third day she took flour and made home-made macaroni. She killed a hen and made a stew. When the drati came home the table was set, and there were roasted onions hot from the bread oven. "'Have you eaten the Hairy Hand?' he de- manded. " 'Yes, I ate it,* she answered. " 'It seems to me you did not eat it,' he said ; and he called 'Hairy Hand !' " 'A-u-u ! What do you want ?' replied a voice. " 'Where are you ?' asked the dragon. THE HAIRY HAND 121 " 'In the big chest,* replied the Hand. "So the dragon knew that the girl had not eaten it, and he said, 'Woe to you ! I cut off your head !' And he cut it off and threw her into the great locked room. "Now when the poor father had spent all the money the dragon had given him he came again to the cave, and inquired for his daughter. Said the dragon, 'She is having a good time; she is with my sister who thinks her pretty.' "The dragon complained that he v/as again all alone, and asked the poor father to bring another daughter. 'Eat,' he said; 'if you are hungry, eat as much as you like.' And again he set out food and brought a fistful of gold. "Next day the father brought his second daughter, and the dragon said to her, as he had to the first, that she was mistress of everything in the cave ex- cept the great locked room. He showed her the hairy hand, and told her she should be his wife if she ate it. 'If not, woe to you!' He gave her three days and went away. "The second daughter looked at the hairy hand, and said to herself, 'This thing I cannot eat,' and she threw it into a cask of wine. "When the drau came home she had done up all the work of the house and the pasta with tomato sauce was on the table. " 'Well ?' he demanded ; 'the Hand ? Have you eaten it?' 122 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "'Yes/ she said; 'I ate It' " 'I don't believe you ate it/ answered the drau, and he called, 'Hairy Hand !' " 'A-u! What do you want?' ' " 'Where are you ?' " 'In the wine cask/ "So the dragon saw that the second daughter had not eaten the hairy hand, and he cut off her head and put her with her sister. "When the poor father was again out of money and came back to the cave to inquire for his two daughters, the dragon said the second girl was visit- ing his brother. He was alone, quite alone, and the father must bring yet a third daughter. The poor man did as he was told, and to the third girl everything happened much as to her sisters. She hid the hairy hand in the oven, and the dragon cut off her head. Where the father came back to ask after his three children, the drau said the third daughter was with his sister-in-law. The poor man agreed for another fistful of gold to bring his fourth daughter, but he warned the dragon not to send her to any of his relatives, because she was the very last. "Now the youngest daughter was more clever than the others. She received the order not to meddle with the door of the locked room, and she promised to eat the hairy hand. But as soon as the dragon had given her three days' respite and had gone away, she unlocked the forbidden door, and found the bodies of her three sisters and of THE HAIRY HAND 123 all the other murdered people. She was frightened, and she thought, 'He will kill me, too ; I am as good as dead.' "On the third day when it was time for the dragon to come home, instead of setting the table, she took a piece of cloth and made a pocket and sewed the hairy hand inside," The Signora folded a corner of her apron to show Sarina just how the youngest daughter had made a bag to hold the hairy hand. Then she went on: "The youngest daughter tied the bag across her stomach with a rag and went to bed. When the dragon found her groaning, he asked, 'What ails you?' "She complained: T don't feel well/ 'Did you eat the hairy hand?' " *Yes ; I have eaten it.' 'Hairy Hand !' called the drau. 'What do you want?' 'Where are you?' 'At the mistress' stomach.' *Va be,' said the drau; 'Since you have eaten it you shall be my wife.' "When the dragon saw that the youngest daughter was ill, he went away, and she got up at once and went back to the forbidden room. This time she heard a sound as of someone trying to breathe. " 'U-h, a-u-h, uh, a-u-h !' It was like this," said the Signora, moaning as if hardly alive. 124 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "In the dark corner of the room the youngest daughter found a man in an iron cage. He was dying of hunger. 'Help me/ he wailed; 'for I am the son of the king.' "The youngest daughter killed a pigeon and made broth. She put a spoon to the bars and fed the man, who lifted his head and began to move his hands Then she minced the flesh of the pigeon fine like meal, and fed that to him. By and by he said, T feel much better.' He told her to send for a shepherd with a mule. " 'But the dragon/ she objected. *' 'He is gone away.* "When the herdsman came, he filed the bars of the cage with a piece of iron, and the king's son and the youngest daughter climbed into the mule's saddle-bags, one on each side. The shepherd stuffed the bags with wool, for it was the time of the shearing of the sheep, and rode away towards the palace of the king. "They had not gone far when they met the dragon, who asked, 'What have you got in those bags ?' " 'Wool,' said the herdsman. "The drau thrust his sword into the saddle-bags, and looked at its point. There was no blood on it, nothing but a bit of wool. So the drau believed the shepherd was telling the truth. He struck the mule with the flat of his sword and said, 'Get on THE HAIRY HAND 125 with you?* and off went the mule to the king's palace. "Now the king's son had been gone two years, and when he reached home there was great rejoic- ing. He kissed his father's hand and said, 'Your majesty, bless me. Father, grant me a wish; give me this girl for my wife.' "Now the youngest daughter had left at the window of her room in the cave a figure dressed in her clothing, so that the dragon might think her at home and attend to his mule before coming in- doors. The hairy hand she had thrown into the rubbish heap. When the dragon saw the doll at the window he called, 'What ails you? Why don't you speak to me ? Comedown.' Then as the figure did not move, he came upstairs and discovered the trick. "'Hairy Hand!' he called. 'Where are you?' " Tn the rubbish.' " 'Then the mistress didn't eat you?* " 'She didn't eat me.' " 'Then why did you say she did eat you?' " 'I said I was at the mistress' stomach, and for- got to say whether I was inside or out.' " 'Where is the mistress ?' . " 'Fled with the son of the king.' "Even in the king's palace the youngest daughter feared the dragon and she told the servant who kept the door to pretend to be deaf in case he came. The dragon did come, and to all his questions the old 126 BY-PATHS IN SICILY woman answered, 'You want onions and beans? Down yon they sell them' ; and she pointed to a shop down the street." But of course the dragon got into the palace, and hid himself inside an enchanted clock to work mischief; and equally of course he was killed by the king's son, and the three older sisters were brought to life, and everybody lived happy ever afterward. Sarina drew a long breath of satisfaction when the tale was finished, and begged for another. "Enough," said the Signora; *'it's time for you to go to bed." But in the end she was coaxed to tell us about a dragon's wife, a "mammadrava." A little wind stirred Sarina's short light hair. She leaned her head against the doorjamb, her eyes fixed blissfully on the Signora's face. She had for- gotten the cannon. "They tell and they retell," began the Signora; "that once upon a time there was a woman who went to the fountain to wash. There came by a 'm.ammadrava' who said: "'What a beautiful smell of Christian meat I If it I see, I'll swallow it neat!' "There is nothing that tastes so good to a dragon or a she-dragon as the flesh of us Christians. " 'Spare me !' cried the woman. "The 'mammadrava' spared the woman because THE HAIRY HAND 127 she was with child, and said, 'I'll eat what you have within you when you have brought it forth.' "The woman gave birth to a beautiful daughter, but she did not give her child to the 'mammadrava.' One day the she-dragon saw the little girl passing and called to her: 'Pretty child, tell your motHer that I want what she promised me.' "The child told her mother, T saw the "mamma- drava," and she said, *T want what your mother promised me." ' "The mother replied, 'Tell the "mammadrava," "Take it where you see it." "When the little girl had given the message the 'mammadrava' said, 'Come here, my child; I have some sweets for you.* "The little girl was afraid; for you must know that a dragon does not talk as do we other Chris- tians; they drawl in a terrifying way through the nose." The Signora bent towards Sarina, giving to every word a harsh nasal twang. "The 'mammadrava' took the child to her house and put her into the 'cannizzu' to fatten until she should be big and tender enough to eat. (In a Sicilian house a tall cylinder of woven cane is an ordinary receptacle for grain or beans. It has a small hole near the floor, stopped commonly with rags.) She fed the little girl with pasta, fish and sweets, giving her every day as much as she could 128 BY-PATHS IN SICILY eat. After a time she said one morning, 'Stick out a finger.' "The child poked a finger through the hole. " 'You are still too little to eat,' said the 'mamma- drava,' and every day she gave her more pasta and more fish and more sweets. As the child grew she became clever; and she thought, 'If she sees that I am now good and big, she will eat me.' So she killed a rat and cut off its tail, and the next time the *mammadrava' said, 'Put out a finger,' instead of a finger she poked out the rat's tail. "The 'mammadrava' was cross and hungry, for it was a long time since she had tasted Christian flesh. She fed the girl as much as she could eat, but always when she asked to see a finger the child put out the rat's tail. At last when the girl was eighteen years old she thought, 'Now that I am really good and big I shall soon be strong enough to get the better of the old she-dragon.' And one day instead of the rat's tail she put out her flesh- and-blood finger. "At sight of it the 'mammadrava's' mouth watered. She took the girl out of the 'cannizzu* and looked at her. 'How fine and fat you are!' she exclaimed, licking her lips. 'We'll make a festa to-day because you have come out.' She built a fire in the oven, for she meant to roast the girl as a dinner for herself and her husband, the dragon. When she thought the oven must be hot enough THE HAIRY HAND 129 she said, 'Go, look into the oven and see if it is ready.' "But the girl answered, 'I don't know anything about the oven; I've lived all my life inside the 'cannizzu.' Go you; I'll set the table.' "When the 'mammadrava' stooped to take away the balata (the sheet of iron that closed the mouth of an oven) the girl took her by the feet and threw her inside and put the balata in position. Then she set the table and brought out wine. "Towards Ave Maria the dragon came home. 'Where is my wife?' he asked. " 'She has gone to market. She is making a festa to-day because I am good and big and have come out of the 'cannizzu.' She is roasting a fine sheep. Do you want to see ?' "The girl opened the oven and the dragon sniffed the roasting meat. 'Would you like to taste a little bit now ?' she suggested. "The dragon was greedy. 'Yes,' he said; 'my wife has such an appetite she'll eat it all and I shan't get a bite. I'll eat a leg.' "The girl gave him as much as he wanted of the flesh of the 'mammadrava.' When he had drunk so much wine that he was sleepy, she took all the goods that God had given the house, and ran away home. . "Now you must surely go to bed," said the Signora to Sarina. The Corso was deserted. The men who through- 130 BY-PATHS IN SICILY out the evening had been standing in the Piazza Sant' Agostino, looking out over the sea, by twos and threes had gone home. The houses were dark and quiet. Sarina looked across the narrow way to a shop where a light still burned. "My sister," she said, "has not finished ironing. Just another little short one. Tell us about the thirteen robbers." "But you know it," replied the Signora. "I don't," I suggested. "Once upon a time," recommenced the Signora patiently, "there was a mother who had two beauti- ful daughters. One day she was obliged to go a long way from home to bleach her flax. She aske3 an old woman to sleep in the house with her daugh- ters that night, and to let no one in for fear of robbers. 'Lock the door as soon as it is dark,' she said, 'and hang the key on the nail.' "The old woman agreed, but as soon as the mother had gone, she sought out the chief of a robber band; and told him that if he would knock at the door at midnight, he might get possession of everything in the house. The robber chief gave the old woman a purse of silver, and at midnight precisely he rapped at the door. The old woman snored as if she were fast asleep. " 'Open, I am your mother,' called the master thief. "The older daughter would have opened, but the younger was more clever. She said, 'Mother would THE HAIRY HAND 131 never come home at this hour.' So the two beautiful girls climbed up into the hay-loft and pulled up the ladder. "There were thirteen of the robbers, and they broke down the door. But the younger daughter threw blocks of rock salt on their heads until she had killed twelve. Only the robber chief remained alive, and to avoid discovery he carried away one at a time the bodies of all his men. "When the mother came home next day the old woman pretended to have slept soundly all night and to have heard nothing. The robber chief was determined to avenge himself, so he asked the mother to give him her younger daughter in mar- riage. The clever girl knew that it was the head robber who sought her, and guessed that he meant to kill her ; but she said yes, and they were married. On the day of the wedding she made a figure as large as herself, dressed it in her own clothes and put it into the bed. Then she hid underneath. "When the head robber came into the room and saw the dummy, he thrust his dagger through and through it, shouting, 'Thus do I take vengeance for the death of my brave lads! Thus do I drink the blood of the murderess!' And he drank of the liquid that ran from the pupa. No sooner had he done so than he started to his feet, crying, 'How sweet is my wife's blood ! I repent me that I have killed her! I will kill myself !' "He began to sob and groan, and he would have IS2 BY-PATHS IN SICILY thrust the knife into his own heart; but the younger daughter jumped from her hiding place and said: ' " 'A sugar doll has bled at your knife And you and I are husband and wife.' " "Is that the end ?" asked Sarina. "Did they make peace?" "Yes," said the Signora ; "they made peace. And when my grandmother told me that story she used to say, 8 " 'Now husband and wife are rich and contended, But we poor folks are sadly stinted.' " Sarina's sister had finished ironing and came to fetch her. It had been a long hot day for the laundress, and while she rested with us in the even- ing air, she, too, begged for a story. The Signora tried to tell us about The Beauty of the Seven Veils; but she couldn't remember it, and gave us instead. The Enchanted Mirror.* "Once upon a time a wicked woman had a beauti- f ull step-daughter whom she beat and kept in rags. One day she asked an enchanted mirror whether the girl was fortunate or unfortunate. "Fortunate," answered the enchanted mirror. ^ " 'La pupa e f atta di zucchero e mieli, E nui siamu maritu e mugghieri.' " 8 " 'Ora sono ricchi c cuntenti, Ma nuiautri restiamu senza nenti.' " THE HAIRY HAND 133 "The step-mother flew into a rage, and commis- sioned a bad old woman to take the child a long way from home and leave her in a place from which she could not find her way back ; but the little girl guessed what was going to happen, and filled her pockets with flour; then as they walked she dropped a little here and there. After they had gone a long distance they sat down in a thicket and ate two pieces of bread. The child was so tired that she fell asleep, and the old woman stole away. "When the wicked step-mother asked the mirror whether or not the girl would come back, the mirror said yes ; and indeed after a couple of days the child came home. The step-mother treated her worse than ever, and after a time inquired again of the mirror whether the girl was lucky or unlucky. The mirror repeated that the girl was lucky, so the step- mother sent her away again with the old woman, feeling her all over before they started to make sure there was no flour this time in her bag. The old v/oman walked and walked, and when at last they sat down in a wood the girl was so tired that she fell asleep before she had tasted food. "When she awoke alone, the beautiful girl did not know which way to turn. Not far away she saw a cave. A latchstring was hanging out, so she opened the door. Inside she found bread and cheese and eggs and oil and wine, and she saw men's cloth- ing hanging from pegs, but nothing belonging to 134 BY-PATHS IN SICILY a woman. She knew the men who lived in the cave must come home to eat, so she gathered minestra and cooked it, and she killed a hen and stewed it with onions and olives and basil. Then she set the table and hid in a corner. "When the twelve brigands who lived in the cave came home and saw the table they thought at first some other brigand must have been there but the head brigand said, 'These are not men's doings, they are the doings of a woman.' " 'If the woman were here,' said the other brigands, 'she should be our sister.' *'When the girl heard this, she came out from her corner. The head brigand made her sit by him and fed her from his own plate. The men told her she should truly be their sister to cook the food and make the beds and attend to all the work of the cave. They gave her fine clothes and became very fond of her. "But after a time the wicked step-mother asked the enchanted mirror whether the girl was alive or dead, and the mirror answered that she was alive and had twelve brothers. Then the step-mother sent for a witch who gave her an enchanted ring that had power to throw into a sleep like death any person who put it on. This ring the step-mother entrusted to the old woman, who went back to the wood and offered it to the girl, who put it on her finger and fell at once asleep. THE HAIRY HAND 135 "When the brigands came home, they mourned their beautiful sister as dead. They put her into a box of carved wood, with a purse by her side, and carried the box to the top of a high mountain. One day a prince who was hunting found the box. When he had opened it, he called his men to carry it to his palace, for he was wiser than the brigands and knew that the beautiful girl was sleeping. In the palace the prince's servant noticed the ring and watched her chance to slip it off the girl's finger, saying to herself, 'What a pretty ring! I'll take it myself !' "As soon as the ring was off her hand the girl awoke and asked for her brothers. She told the prince about her step-mother and the old woman, but as to her brothers she refused to say anything except that they lived in a cave. The prince guessed they must be brigands and gave his word to pardon them, 'for,' he said, 'you are to be my spouse.' So they were married and the prince gave the brigands much land. "Then again the wicked step-mother asked the mirror whether the beautiful girl was alive or dead. 'She is now a princess,' said the mirror ; 'she is the wife of the king's son ; she lives in a splendid palace and wears fine clothes.' " 'Then how can I avenge myself?* screamed the step-mother. "The mirror did not answer. It had spoken in the past, because the beautiful girl was fortunate. 136 BY-PATHS IN SICILY her happy fate was certain to be fulfilled. But now destiny was accomplished. She was a princess and happy. What more was there to say? "The step-mother broke the mirror in her rage; it never spoke again." CHAPTER VI Jesus as Destroyer Another time, when the Lord Jesus was coming home in the evening with Joseph, he met a boy who ran so hard against him that he threw him down. To whom the Lord Jesus said, "As thou hast thrown me down, so shalt thou fall, nor ever rise." And that moment the boy fell down and died. . . . Then said Joseph to St. Mary, "Henceforth we will not allow him to go out of the house ; for everyone who dis- pleases him is killed." — Apocryphal books of the New Testa- ment; First Gospel of the Infancy, Chaps. XIX and XX. In spite of the fervor of the Bambino cult, the most important person of the Sicihan Holy Family is the Madonna, because she is not only powerful, but in her relations with man she is almost uniformly benign. Caprices of ill-temper are indeed attributed to her, as in case of the old charm against colic: *Vine branches out, vine branches in, Straw and grain. Away in no time goes this pain. For Jesus' sake No more of this ache. ^ Fora sciarmenti, intra sciarmenti, Pagghia e f rumenti ; Si nni va stu duluri tempu nenti. Pi lu nomu di Gesu Mi ci passa e nun mi nni avi nenti chiu. 137 138 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Once upon a time, the tale goes, the Madonna was cold and begged of a neighbor cuttings pruned from the vines. The woman refused, saying she had none ; but the Madonna knew that she had and cursed her saying, "May you twist in pain like the prunings that are twisting under your oven." Whereupon the woman writhed in torment until the Madonna thought she had been punished enough and charmed away the pain with the prayer now in use. But in spite of such trivial outbursts, the Madonna appears in the folk tales as the world's great kindly Mother. San Giuseppe, too, is a wholly benevolent patriarch; but there are aspects of the Lord Jesus which remind one of the anecdotes of a vindictive Child Christ related in the Apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy. As in more than one ancient trinity there figure the creator, the preserver and the destroyer-regen- erator, so in the Sicilian trinity of father, mother and child one is tempted to place the child as the destructive force, thwarted and controlled by the mother. In old stories still current, as in songs newly manufactured, the Lord Jesus is shown as wrathful against men as was the far-darting Apollo towards the people who neglected his altars. On one of my first visits to Messina after the earthquake of 1908, 1 heard the wail of a cantastorie among the ruins, and bought a copy of the penny ballad the crippled, dim-sighted old man was singing JESUS AS DESTROYER 139 to curiosity-seekers and to those who sought their dead in that great sepulchre. The song of forty- eight stanzas explained the catastrophe as an effort of Jesus to destroy the world • an attempt limited in its success by Mary. Said lu Signuri: . . . "For me the world is dead; Destroyed would I see the blue sky." So his mantle black of wrath he took To break man's back that he die. He called the earthquake quickly; To his command it ran. "Shake thou the earth this minute! Destroy perfidious man !" The earthquake obeyed orders, and men ran from their houses calling on the Madonna. She was asleep, but the groans of the dying woke her and at once she bade earth and sea be still. They refused obedience, telling her that Christ had expressly com- manded them to sink the entire earth: "This word from whom did you get it To destroy my people devout?" The sea it answered her promptly. "The command 't is of Christ, do not doubt." Then the Madonna went to her son and besought him by her tears, Behold how many thousands dead! The innocent for help who cry! Forget your wrath, all-powerful son ; Think of your bitter cross so high. 140 BY-PATHS IN SICILY Jesus refused to listen, saying that man had been warned with floods and fire, but refused to respect either sacraments or gospel, and the time had come to make an end of him: See you not man, the ill-liver? His sins he does not repent; Even the lads of tender years New blasphemies invent. Yet in the end the Madonna had her will. Jesus put off his black cloak, though grudgingly, and bade her do as she chose. At once she renewed her command to earth and sea: "O earthquake, return to thy corner," Then said the great spotless Mother; "Calm the fears of these my devoted, And make no more pitiless slaughter. And thou, sea wave, get back also; From my son the grace I have got." So, but for the Virgin Maria, This earth as 'tis now were not. But for Mary, the fate of Messina would have been the fate of the entire world. Again after the earthquake at Linera in the spring of 1914 the "story-singer" sang of the wrath of Christ and the intervention of the Madonna to save man. In a ballad called "The Powerful Earth- quakes in Sicily" Jesus Christ tells his mother that he can no longer endure the insults heaped on him, and that if he has called in the earthquake, it is JESUS AS DESTROYER 141 no affair of hers. This time San Giuseppe came to his wife's help, demanding payment, if the earth was to go down in wreck, of the Madonna's dowry: First give to me the sun and moon, And stars and earth, then too the sea, Paradise, angels, archangels and saints; These must thou give me instantly. And next consign to me the crown Of my wife constant and divine; For these things are her dowry ; of them She's mistress; hers they are and mine. The price was found so great that man received his pardon. This doggerel, lacking simplicity and sincerity as completely as it lacks the dialectic interest of the older ballads, is of value only as showing the me- chanical continuance of a tradition through its own impetus. It was a drowsy afternoon when I first heard this song of San Giuseppe and the Madonna, one of those August afternoons when even the sea is sunwhite, except where waving lines mark the track of a boat long past or the motion of currents. At Gna Vanna's doorstone in the Via Bagnoli Croce a group of women were shucking almonds. Zu Vincenzu Nanu, the dwarf, has thirty-four trees on his bit of land under the castle, and their fruit lay in sacks just inside the door. Peeling the outside shell off rich brown mennuli is commonly a merry task, but this day we were 142 BY-PATHS IN SICILY very quiet. The drought was extreme. From where we sat we could look up at the castle crag above the town, gray and yellow, bleached and bare, hot in the sun. Clinging to fissures, dwarfed fichi d'India drooped their sapless leaves to the rock. On the steep lower slopes against the gray-white terraces stood out withering almond trees, Zu Vincenzu's among them, dropping discouraged yellow leaves. Instead of splitting away in ripening, the shells of our nuts had dried to the stone, making it neces- sary to use teeth and bits of rock as well as fingers in shucking them. Mine was the only knife in the party. The nuts, too, were so small and poor that low prices stood out in prospect. Then, too, that morning thirty young men had left Taormina to join the colors, and who knew whether or not next morning another manifesto would be posted, calling other classes, and who knew whether or not Italy was going into the great war? Probably yes ; for both the Pope and the black pope were dead; God had called home his ambassadors. "Woe, woe to us others," complained Za Sara, puckering tighter her brown puckered face. "Last year I earned a lira and a half a day for a month, shucking almonds; but this year there are no nuts. Without taking in soldi how shall we live?" A breath of wind stirred her rough hair. Za Sara has only two teeth, though she is not an old woman; a yellow fang on one side of the lower jaw and a second on the other side of the upper. JESUS AS DESTROYER 143 I do not know how she keeps up with the other women biting off the outer shells of almonds. "Woe, woe to us," she went, her eyes, drawn up small by exposure to the sun, lost behind puckers of anxiety. "God sends us thirst and war! It is the punishment of our sins." "Does God send thirst and war?" I ventured. "Thirst, yes," answered old Za Delfi Sittima — Aunt Delphia, the seven-months-child; "for the Lord rains when he will; but war is an affair of kings." It was after this pronouncement of the separation of church and state that we heard the quavering lament of the cantastorie. A blind old man led by a boy was coming down the street singing of the destruction of Linera: To an earthquake mighty and strong Christ gave the order, you ken ; But Mary the mother asked him, "What do'st thou, O Lamb, to men?" When the singer had tottered away over the cob- ble stones to the next group of houses, I inquired, "Why is the Madonna kinder to us than the Lord Jesus?" "Because she is the Mother," said Gna Vanna. Bastianu, the youngest of her three grandchildren, had been fretting for a tomato. Pulling a round, brown loaf of bread out of the table drawer, he brought it to Gna Vanna, who cut him a piece, 144 BY-PATHS IN SICILY muttering as she struggled with the dull knife, "Hard as a mazzacani," a stone big enough to kill a dog. Bastianu got his white little teeth into it without trouble, and flung himself on the sacks of nuts whimpering for the "pumiduru," the golden apple, as the tomato is called. Bastianu was ill. A tomato would hurt him. All night long he had fever. An ailing child is a great expense. Five pennies of milk she bought for Bas- tianu every day, three in the morning and two at night; while Vincenzinu, his five-year-old brother, contented himself with bread and wine. Unmoved by this reasoning, Bastianu whined the louder. Gna Vanna's face sharpened; her bright eyes became steely. "Get out !" she screamed. "Get out of here! You dirty dog! You devil's face!** The child began shrieking. Seizing Zu Vin- cenzu's stick, she took Bastianu by the slack of his dust-colored, faded clothes and cast him at our feet in the narrow, cobble-paved way. Gasping, he came back to her side, his dark eyes shining too big by half in his white little face. "Why do you make the child cry!" screeched Gna Vanna, throwing back his stick to Zu Vin- cenzu, who sat as usual bent in his chair, his head tied up in a red kerchief, oblivious to everything that went forward. Kissing Bastianu, she gave him a tomato in each hand. "The Madonna," she continued, turning to me, "is the Mother; she keeps us beneath her mantle. JESUS AS DESTROYER 145 You know, Signurinedda, how a mother is. If a child is bad, she gives him some good slaps, but afterwards she kisses and caresses him. The Madonna is like that with us. But the Lord Jesus, you know, Signurinedda, he is her son, and children have no judgment." Zu Vincenzu, rousing himself, retreated to a seat behind the bed, his skin sandals making a scuffing sound as he crossed the cement floor. Gna Vanna made spiteful horns with her fingers behind his back; and then, shucking nuts faster than the best of us, she began telling us between bites a tale of how the Madonna thwarted Jesus. The Ashes of the Sheep "Once upon a time a boy was minding sheep Vv^hen there appeared a man who said, 'You must give me the best lamb you have.' ** 'I can't give it to you,' said the boy shepherd, 'because they are not mine ; they are my master's.* " 'Then go to your master and tell him there is a gentleman who wants the best sheep there is.' " 'Vossia, I can't go/ said the boy, 'because I have to mind my sheep.' " 'I'll watch them,' said the man. "So the boy went, and the padrone, who thought the man might take all his lambs if he refused one, told the shepherd to bid him take whichever one he liked. 146 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "The man chose the best of the lambs and gave it to the boy saying, 'Hold it.' The boy took the lamb by its four feet and held it. Then the man said, 'Get me some wood.' "The boy picked up what wood he could find and some light stuff for kindlings. Then the man said, 'Give me a match.' " 'Vossia, I haven't any,' said the boy ; 'I don't carry matches.' " 'But you see that you have some ; you do carry matches,' replied the galantomo, nodding towards the boy's pockets. The boy felt in his sacchetti and found matches. Then the man made a great fire and said, pointing to the Iamb, 'Throw it in!' "The boy threw the lamb into the fire alive, just as it was, with all its wool." Gna Vanna took off her apron and threw it by its four corners on to the nut sacks, as if it had been the lamb. "Alive with its wool," she repeated, her hooped earrings bobbing, her shining faded eyes expressing the boy's fright and horror. "When the lamb was entirely burned, the man took a stick and scattered the ashes. As soon as these were cold he told the boy to sweep them with a brush of leaves. Then he said, 'Give me a hand- kerchief.' " 'Vossia,' said the boy, *I haven't any ; I don't carry a handkerchief,* ** 'You see that you have one/ answered the man. JESUS AS DESTROYER 147 nodding again towards the boy's sacchetti. The boy felt in his pockets and found a handkerchief." Gna Vanna pulled up her faded cotton skirt and felt in the bag pocket that hung by its cords from her waist, drawing out a huge kerchief, at which she gazed with all the amazement of the shepherd boy. " 'You see that you do carry a handkerchief,' said the man. He made the boy hold it by the four corners while he poured into it all the ashes." Gna Vanna's kerchief drooped in the middle with the weight of imaginary ashes, and she held it carefully with both hands, finally knotting to- gether the corners. "The gentleman made the boy tie up the bundle, and he said, 'Now you must go to the sea and throw it in.' " 'Excellency, I can't go,' said the boy. 'The sea is a long way off, your Excellency. I must mind my sheep.' " 'You must go to the sea and throw in the ashes,' repeated the man. 'I'll mind the sheep.* "So the boy went. Half way on his journey he met a woman who said to him, 'Where are you going?' " 'I am going to the sea,' he answered, 'to throw in this handkerchief with the ashes.* "'Where did you get it?' ** 'A man gave it to me.' " 'Give it to me.' 148 BY-PATHS IN SICILY "When the woman had looked at the hand- kerchief with the ashes, she said, 'My son! I thought so! At it again!' "The woman was the Madonna, though the boy did not know it; and the gentleman was really the Lord Jesus. Because of the sins of man he meant to destroy the world. If the boy had reached the sea, and had thrown in the ashes, the world would have gone in ruins like Messina. But the Madonna took the handkerchief and put it under her arm, hidden by her shawl. " 'Because of his sins,' she said, *I take away from man three things, bread, wine and oil ; but let the world stand as it is.' "Then she said to the boy, 'Greetings/ and she went away to her own house. "The boy said, 'Vossia, give me your blessing,' and he returned to his sheep. "When the boy reached the place where the fire had been, the gentleman asked him, 'Did you throw the handkerchief into the sea?' "The boy said a woman had taken it away from him. The Lord Jesus knew that it was the Ma- donna, and he said, 'I salute thee ; nothing but that ; I salute thee.' The boy answered, 'Your blessing. Excellency' ; and watched him as he took a step or two away. All at once the man disappeared. The boy went home and lay down on his bed. He died of fright. "Children have no judgment," concluded Gna JESUS AS DESTROYER 149 Vanna. "The Lord Jesus wishes to unmake the world, but the Madonna does not permit, because she is the Mother. It is true that we are sinners, and that is why we have no food. The Madonna has taken away bread, oil and wine. It does not rain, and there are no crops ; but the Madonna does not allow her son to make an end of us. • "Do I say well?" she demanded, tapping her forehead with a long forefinger, and glancing from one to another, confident of approval. "Are these things excellent? I have no books, but I have all these things in my head. I know these things, and other people do not know them. The Madonna keeps us tmder her mantle. You agree with me?" By this time Bastianu had finished eating, and was crawling under the table to get at a quartara of water. He mishandled the thick earthem jar, which rolled on its side, fortunately without break- ing. "I'll knock you!" shrieked Gna Vanna with a blow of her clenched fist under her chin. Scrambling out of her way and out of the way of the running water, Bastianu struck the box under the bed in which sat a hen open-beaked in the heat. With a squawk the fowl flapped out of the box and out of the room. Gna Vanna rose threateningly, but Bastianu had escaped with the hen. Cumari Ciccia, the most good-natured woman on the street, had worked at the nuts until glances from Gna Vanna's eyes hinting that she ate too ISO BY-PATHS IN SICILY freely while shelling sent her to her own steps just opposite. From that point she could still talk with us, and now she came back with a pan of greens to pick over for minestra, saying, "I can tell Vossia another story." The Old Man and the Bells "Once upon a time an old man was digging in a vineyard when there appeared to him a young man who said, 'You must go to the church of the Ma- donna di la Catina to ring the bell.' "The old man answered, 'It is far. I have not strength for the climb.' "Then the young man, who was the Lord Jesus, replied, 'You have the strength and you have to go.' " 'But,' said the old man, 'the church is shut* " 'The church is open,* said the young man. "The old man carried his zappa to the straw hut where he had left his coat. Then he climbed the mountain side to the church where no one ever goes except in September to the great festa. Vossia has been to the festa? She knows the church, high up above Mongiuffi? The church was open. The old man went in, and began to climb the stairs of the campanile, when there appeared a woman who said, 'Good old man, where are you going?' " 'To ring the bell. A young man told me I must come to the church to ring the bell. He said the church would be open, and it is open.' JESUS AS DESTROYER 151 "The woman was the Madonna. She said to the old man, 'What was the young man like?' "The old man told her, and she said, 'It was my son, who wants to sink the world. Go away ! Don't ring the bell.' "The old man went down the belfry steps and back to the vineyard. He had just picked up his zappa and was going to work again when the young man appeared a second time, and said, 'Did you ring the bell? I did not hear it' " 'I met a woman who told me not to ring.' "Then the Lord Jesus said, 'My mother! Must you break my heart again, troubling my plans ?' At once he disappeared. "If the old man had rung the bell, the world would have gone down in ruins." Donna Ciccia retreated as soon as she had fin- ished, for Gna Vanna took revenge for the almonds by nibbling the tenderest greens. Zu Vincenzu had come back from his corner, and now he suggested, "Vossia, when you go to your own country, you must make known to the learned what we tell you here. I myself must " But Gna Vanna and the others interrupted the blind old man. The idea of a benevolent power and a power for destruction crops out in many directions. Only a few days after the almond-shelling party there came a partial eclipse of the sun. An hour or two after the excitement was over Gna Vanna was snapping green beans when I passed her door, Zu Vincenzu 152 BY-PATHS IN SICILY helping by shelling beans out of the larger pods. When he had finished a handful he reached them out uncertainly in her direction. "Signurinedda, did you see it ?" Gna Vanna called to me, patting the back of an inviting chair. Donna Ciccia, Cumari Lucia, who is Gna Vanna's goddaughter, and others of the cronies, dropped their work to come to the doorstep rendezvous. Donna Ciccia's nose and forehead were still blackened from gazing through smoked glass. "All the better it is passed," she said, her dark eyes twinkling good-humoredly. Gna Vanna threw the refuse of the beans on a heap of wool flocks inside the door, her thin ani- mated old face brightening at the prospect of an audience. "Yes," she repeated ; "the less harm that it is over, for an eclipse always brings fear." "Why?" I queried. "Because the sun and the moon are angry with each other; they quarrel, and if the moon should win, it would destroy the world." "But the sun always wins," I suggested. "Yes," agreed Gna Vanna. "The sun is more powerful. The sun is the Madonna; the moon is her son, the Lord Jesus ; you know that." "How do I know that? I don't understand," I said. "Certainly Vossia knows that. *God is sun and God is moon.' You remember?" JESUS AS DESTROYER 153 I remembered a couplet I had often heard her use in spells against the evil eye. So I quoted: ^° God is moon and God is sun ; Work you ill there can no one. "That is what you mean?" I questioned. "Of course !" she returned triumphantly. "Vossia is convinced? The moon is the young master, the sun is the Madonna. The moon would like to burn the world, but the sun does not permit. To-day the sun, in order not to quarrel with the moon, hid be- hind the clouds. Instead of doing harm, the sun did good, because there came a little rain. The Ma- donna is always kind. She hides us beneath her mantle." The neighbors did not contradict her identifica- tions. More or less openly they call her a witch, openly and secretly they have, some more, some less, faith in her knowledge and powers. Cumare Lucia ventured a wish that the Madonna would send rain enough to do some good before the olives dropped off the trees. The women drifted away to their own doorstones, and Gna Vanna began to fry peppers for supper. As I rose to go she paused in front of me, fork in hand, to say, "It can't rain; the rain is bound." Her pale blue, bright eyes regarding alternately me and the peppers, she told me that certain masters ® Ddiu e suli e Ddiu e luna ; Supra di vui nun ci po persuna. 154 BY-PATHS IN SICILY in charge of work that had been in progress for some months on the raihvay below us at Giardini had tal