f the big streets,
led me through narrow lanes to one of the gates of the town. There had
been a storm the previous night, so sudden that our supper had been
spoilt before we could get it under cover and we had to begin again
inside the restaurant. The clouds had all cleared away and the panorama,
as seen from the gate, was at its best with the sun beating down on the
slopes of the mountain-side and sprinkling sapphires all over the sea.

Micio, however, had not come to admire the view; he turned from it to the
books that were laid out on a shady ledge of the town-wall and began to
consider those with the illustrated covers. He wanted them all, not
simultaneously but one after the other. He paused before _Uno Strano
Delitto_ but, the crime being too strange to be comprehensible, we passed
on to _Guirlanda Sanguinosa_, a lady dressed in bridal attire but,
doubtless through exposure to the weather, the blood had faded off the
wreath of orange blossoms, so we took up another. _Il Bacio del
Cadavere_ was about a lady in evening dress who had got out of cab No.
3402 which was waiting for her in the moonlight while she conversed with
the porter at the gates of the cemetery; Micio's anxiety to ascertain
whether the interview was preliminary or subsequent to the corpse's kiss
was not acute enough to induce him to buy the book. There was another
about a kiss, _Bacio Infame_, on which a lady with a stiletto was
defending herself from a bad man. All these were enticing, but we hoped
to do better, and I began to blush for the somewhat thin plot of
_Tristram Shandy_ and to be thankful that my copy was not in Italian.
Finally he took _La Mano del Defunto_: at the back of a sepulchral
chamber in a violated coffin, from which the lid had been removed, lay
the body of a woman, shockingly disarranged, over the edge hung her right
arm, the hand had been cut off and was being carried away by a city gent
in tall hat, unbuttoned frock coat, jaunty tie, yellow boots and streaky
trousers; he had a dark lantern with the help of which he had committed
the sacrilege--very horrible which attracted Micio, and only twenty-five
centimes which attracted me. We might possibly have done better, but we
should have had to search a long time. So we bought it and thought we
might take something else as well. Now, it seemed to me, was the time
for _Carlo Magno and the Paladins_ or the _Life of Musolino_, or
_Robinson Crusoe_, or _Don Quixote_, or _T