ay or two, he arrived at once. He
had wings, but they wanted repairing, so I carried him carefully from the
tray and deposited him in the corner of the room in which the baby lay.

My priest found several other examples of the Nascita and took me to see
them before I left Trapani. The differences were slight; in one case
there were only three rooms; in another the rooms were divided so as to
vary in size; in another the rooms had windows at the back with
balconies. Sometimes the guests were reading the _Giornale di Sicilia_,
and I saw opera-glasses on the table in one room and in another the
gentlemen had deposited their tall hats on the sofa. There were
book-cases full of books and the bedrooms were furnished down to the most
insignificant but necessary details. S. Joachim in one of the houses was
entertaining only three friends, and they had no kingly marks upon them;
they were perhaps descendants of the condottieri. I thought afterwards
of going back to inquire, but one cannot very well return to a house
where one has seen a Nascita and ask to be allowed to look again to make
sure whether or not the guests have hung up their crowns on the hat pegs
of the umbrella-stand at the front entrance. There was something about
these gentlemen, something in their costume as they sat at a round table
with S. Joachim, a queer 1830 feeling that put me in mind of Mr. Pickwick
and his three friends sitting in their private room at the "George and
Vulture," George Yard, Lombard Street, except that they were only
drinking coffee.

In the garden at the entrance to one house was a baby taking the air in a
perambulator and a band of eight musicians with a conductor. There was
real water with a tap and a basin in the kitchen so that the guests might
wash their hands after dinner. There was a mouse-trap in the corner of
the kitchen. In one room the guests were playing cards, in another
eating ices, and I observed a toy piano with the extended compass of six
notes.

In all the kitchens there was a Turk for the cuscuso. It is made with
fish, semolina, and onions in a double saucepan which in England is
called a steamer. In the bottom part water is boiled; in the top part,
over the holes, they put a layer of chopped onions, and over that the
semolina which has been previously made into very small balls by damping
it. The onions prevent the semolina from falling through the holes into
the water, and the steam of the water coming