rlic."
They believe that to put three crosses of garlic under the bed of a woman
in child-birth will ensure a happy issue. There is something fortunate
or healthy also about vetch and, no doubt, some special significance
about lard and the beans of the carob. These beliefs are based lower
than Giovanni Bianca's primeval lava, and I know no more about their
origin than he does, but I suppose they are older than the Romans, older
than the Greeks, older than the Sikels and the Sikans--probably much more
than ten thousand or fourteen thousand years old. They spring from a
soil which has become fertile by catching the dust of ages, tossed to and
fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, wherein generations of
beliefs have grown up, flourished and decayed. There is no more
fertilising manure for a struggling young faith than the rotting remains
of a dead superstition. And the roots pierce down beneath the soil and
shoot into the crevices of an intolerance more unyielding than buried
lava. To understand these things, one ought to become a pupil of
Professore Pitre, and make a study of the science of demopsicologia, and
even then one would only get glimpses of the more recent deposits of
civilisation that lie crushed one under the other like the parallel
surfaces of rich earth in the pit sunk near Jaci.

Whatever the significance of the things they carried or the origin of
their belief in them, the people in the carts kept flinging them to the
boys in the road, who caught them and picked them up and carried them off
to make their festa with them later on. They were all very lively, but
no one seemed to me very drunk, not more drunk than the nudi were naked;
there were drunken people among them, but not enough to make me feel sure
that S. Alfio ought to be identified with Bacchus. One can see more
drunkenness on Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, but one does not
hastily identify Saint Lubbock with Dionysus.

CATANIA

CHAPTER XXI
HOLY WEEK

PALM SUNDAY

Being in Catania for Holy Week I went to the cathedral on Palm Sunday.
The archbishop in his yellow mitre, red inside because he is also a
cardinal, accompanied by nine canons in white mitres and many priests and
others, passed out of the church by a side exit and proceeded to the
western entrance, which was closed against him. I heard him knock and
listened to the chanted dialogue which he carried on with those inside.
I saw the great doors thr