snow on Etna, and I stumbled across Carmelo.

"Buona Pasqua, Carmelo, and have you been to church this morning?"

No, he had been to the port with his friends to see the steamer in which
they were to go to Naples; there they would change into another steamer
and be taken to the States. They had begged, borrowed, stolen, or, it
may be, possibly even earned enough soldi to begin their new life upon
another soil and under other skies in a new world. Buona Pasqua.

I returned to the albergo and found that Turiddu had been and had left
for me a characteristic Sicilian cake--a ring of bread on one side of
which, half embedded in the pasta, were four new-laid eggs. This was
accompanied by a note from his mother begging me to accept it as her
Easter offering of goodwill. She was telling me more than that the hens
had begun to lay again. She was reminding me of how I had seen her at
the Teatro Pessana as the link between her mother and her children,
joining them and separating them like a passage of modulation. I
understood her to mean that for the future I was to see an egg as a
transitional something between the hen that laid it and the chicken that
will burst from its shell, as a secret place of repose where the one is
transmuted into the other, as a sacred temple wherein is prepared a
mystery of resurrection. Mothers know some things that cannot be told
except in symbolism, and not very clearly then, symbols being as
perplexing as unresolved diminished sevenths which may be understood in
many different senses. I read the riddle of the eggs in the sense
suggested by the context of the Gloria, and I think I read it aright, for
in Catania on that Easter morning we were all of one mind, we were all
breathing the Gloria, we were all filled with the spirit of the new life,
the spirit that animated also our far-away English monk as he sat in his
Berkshire cell making music for

Summer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu.

In the evening I went to the Machiavelli. The theatre had been taken by
a young amateur who carries on a business of forwarding oranges and other
fruit. He gave a performance of one of Giovanni Grasso's plays,
_Feudalismo_, part of which I was obliged to see because in the second
act there is a song sung behind, and Turiddu had been asked to sing it;
on such a day the claims of the family were stronger even than on Palm
Sunday. His voice has not yet broken, but if it turns out to be as good
for