chair, with the
famous rod in his hand, watched and contemplated. Under the fig-tree at
Cadate, Don Giuseppe Costabarbieri sat in contemplation. At S. Mamette
the doctor, the grocer, and the shoemaker were hanging over the water
and contemplating most diligently. At Cressogno the Marchesa's florid
cook was contemplating. Opposite Oria, on the shady deserted shore of
Bisgnago, a dignified arch-priest from lower Lombardy was in the habit
of leading a life of contemplation for forty days every year. All alone
he sat, with three rods resting at his feet, while with the air of a
bishop, he contemplated the three floats belonging to these rods--two
with his eyes, one with his nose. If some one, passing far out on the
lake could have seen all these brooding figures without perceiving the
rods, the lines, and the floats, he would have thought himself in a
country inhabited by hermits and ascetics, who, weary of the earth, were
contemplating the sky in this liquid mirror, simply for the sake of
greater convenience.

As a matter of fact, all these ascetics were fishing for tench, and no
mystery the future of humanity might contain could be of more
importance to them than those mysteries at which the little float
secretly hinted, when, as if possessed by a spirit, it showed signs of
growing unrest, and, at last, even of mental derangement; for, after
dipping and jerking, now forward, now backward, it would at last, in the
utter confusion of its ideas, choose the desperate course of plunging
head foremost into the depths. These phenomena, however, occurred only
at rare intervals, and some of the contemplators would pass whole
half-days without noticing the slightest movement in their floats. Then
each one, removing his eyes from the bit of cork, would follow a line of
thought running parallel with the line attached to the rod. Thus it
sometimes happened that the arch-priest would land an episcopal see, the
"fine gentleman," a wood that had once belonged to his ancestors, the
cook, a tench from the hills, rosy and fair, and Custant, an order from
government to whitewash the peak of Cressogno. As to Carlascia, his
second line was usually of a political nature, and the reason of this
will be more readily grasped if we reflect that the main line, the one
attached to the rod, often awoke in his big, dull head certain political
considerations which the Commissary Zerboli had suggested to him. "You
see, my dear Receiver," Zerboli had once