gain and is worshipped as much as ever she
was, only she is now called the Lottery."

"It was a neglected opportunity."

"And it would have been so easy to invent a legend of the arrival of a
picture or a statue of la Madonna di Palestrina to inherit the prestige
of Fortune. Then I should never have left home to join the guardia di
finanza."

I said that possibly something of the kind had been attempted, and that
there may have been insuperable obstacles of which we knew nothing; and
in any case, whatever the desolation of Palestrina, Custonaci was not in
a particularly thriving condition, while the prosperity of Monte San
Giuliano is due more to the salt than to the Madonna. But he would not
be comforted; so I asked him what he would have done if he had not left
home, and he told me that he had been educated to be a chemist and had
taken his diploma at Rome with the intention of succeeding to his uncle's
shop, but he could not stand the dulness of the life.

The brigadier called to us that coffee was ready and we turned to go in.
The young man came about the kid, which meant that his father had agreed
to take 80 centesimi per kilo. So the kid had to be weighed and it was
some time before we could persuade the vendor that it was just under and
not just over 5.5 kilos. To tell the truth, it was a delicate job, for
the steelyard was a clumsy instrument, though, like the sceptical guard's
language, the best we had. The brigadier paid the young man entirely in
coppers, so he had a good deal of weight to carry home with him.

After coffee we started to walk across the plain back to Custonaci,
calling again at the settlement of cottages and waiting for the boats to
come in, thinking it possible that the luck brought by the farfalla
notturna might take the form of fish. But the boats brought nothing. We
agreed therefore to consider that the beauty of the morning had exhausted
the good fortune and, if so, the farfalla had done the thing handsomely.
It was a day of blue sky and brown earth, with flocks of sheep and goats
tinkling their bells in the distance; a day of dwarf palm and
almond-blossom, and the bark of a dog now and then; of aloes and flitting
birds, of canes with feathery tops, of prickly pears and blooming red
geranium. The bastone di S. Giuseppe had begun to come up and the tufts
of grass were full of lily-leaves preparing for the spring.

We climbed the cliff and scrambled into the village. It was Su