ortune
to send you the money. Buy a ticket with a likely number and you will
have the right to hope."

"It is like praying for rain," added the brigadier; "the Madonna may not
answer the prayer, but those who pray have done their best and are
entitled to hope that rain will follow."

"This," I said, "reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her
daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own
imaginary complaints. 'How can you hope to be well,' she used to say,
'if you never take any medicine?'"

"Exactly," said the guard who believed in the moth, "we do not know how
the medicine works any more than we know how the Madonna works, or how a
dream affects the lottery, but if you do nothing it is no use hoping."

With regard to my cold, the sceptical guard, with a twinkle in his eye,
recommended me to repent of the sins for which I had said it was a
punishment. I was ready to do so if I could be sure as to which sins it
was more particularly aimed at. The sceptical guard thought he knew.

"Did you not tell us you had been on the Mountain at the festa? When the
sagrestano unveiled the picture in the sanctuary this morning, the
Madonna heard the bells ring and looked round the church; no doubt she
recognized you as the heretical Englishman she had seen prying into her
mysteries. She probably regretted she had not paid you out at the time
and, as you came her way this morning, took the opportunity of doing it
now."

I agreed that it would have been more of a miracle had she done it in a
balmy August, in the midst of other occupations, instead of in a
tempestuous January when business was slack; but, on the whole, I did not
believe that either the Madonna or my sins had had anything to do with my
cold which I considered to be a natural, or non-miraculous, consequence
of the rain and the wind. But the sceptical guard objected that even so
the Madonna could not get quite clear, for, if she is credited with the
rain, as she certainly is, she must be debited with its unpleasant
consequences, if any.

The guard who had heard the bells ring, when he came to meet us, gravely
nodded his approval, not seeing that the sceptical guard was speaking
ironically, but he began to suspect presently. The guard who believed in
the moth told us that he had been stationed once on the coast a little
east of Girgenti, near a town where the peasants pray for rain to their
patron, S. Calogero, whose paint