criptions and gossiping with his friends.
We went on down the street and my thoughts wandered to other subjects.
In the first place there was my hat, or rather Berto's uncle's hat, for,
though I had remembered about the guests at the Nascita wearing evening
clothes, I had forgotten that they brought their cylindrical hats, and
Berto had borrowed one for me, which was so small I had to hold it on.
And the wind blew and roared and shook the shutters and banged the
windows and doors and smashed the glass down on to the roughly paved
streets, and the dense, chilly cloud went through the cracks and
penetrated into every house and damped the beds and discoloured the
whitewash of the walls. And I had Berto's mother on one arm and could
not keep his uncle's hat on my head. At last I took it off and carried
it under my other arm, putting on my head a cap which I happened to have
in my pocket.

We came to the steep part of the street near the salone of Peppino and I
thought of his looking-glasses that were temporarily adorning the future
bedroom of Berto's compare, and I thought of Butler's accident and of the
authoress of the _Odyssey_ writing her poem up here three thousand years
ago. And what are three thousand years to Time in his flight? An
interval that he can clear with a flap or two of his mighty wings. No
one knows how often he has flapped them since these narrow roughly paved
streets began to give the town its irregular shape; no one knows anything
of the prehistoric incarnations of her who has reigned here as Phoenician
Astarte, as Greek Aphrodite, as Roman Venus, and who now reigns here as
Italian Maria. We were adding one more to the processions that during
unnumbered ages have passed along the streets of Mount Eryx worshipping
the Mystery of Birth.

We turned down by the Palazzo Platamone and at last reached the Matrice.
The floor was hidden by the people standing on it and the ceiling by
thousands of wax candles hanging from it. The organ was playing
antiphonally with Peppi Bosco, who had preceded us with his trombone and
his municipal music. We went into the sagrestia and I did not at first
recognise the Arciprete Messina who received us, for I had not previously
seen him in his vestments, but he knew me. We had met in the street when
he was wearing his ordinary clothes the day before and I had told him I
had his photograph taken by Butler, who wanted his face because it is
particularly round, like that