pted to wonder whether he might perhaps be speaking the truth, but I
glanced again at his coin and recovered myself.

"Now look here, Cupid," I said, "I don't want to breathe a syllable
against the honour of your mother, but you know better than anyone that
when a woman loses her head you are generally to blame. This is your
doing"--and I took out of my pocket and showed him a post-card I had
bought that morning in the Via Roma with a reproduction of the Venere
Anadiomene. "And men also have lost their heads because of you. I am
not the only one who has heard about the Duca di Bronte and Lady
Hamilton. Look round at these beautiful ladies and at these brave
officers and young men--do they not bear upon their forms and features
the signatures of Arethusa's foreign visitors? You ought to be able to
decipher that palimpsest, if anyone can, for it was you who taught them
to write; Ortigia would never have seen them if it had not been for you.
And why are they sitting under the trees and walking about in the
moonlight, do you suppose?"

He replied that they had come out to listen to the music and he wished
there were more of them because then he would get more pennies.

"What!" I exclaimed; "people who do not even recognise a modulation to
the dominant when they hear one come out to listen to music! You know
better than that. They have not come out because of Gounod, they have
come because of you. It is always the same old story. It was your fault
that Alpheus chased Arethusa out of Greece and that Proserpine was
carried off from Enna. It was you who suggested to those Phoenician
traders that the nurse of the little Eumaeus would be good company for
them, and you who made her consent to go. This music, of which I should
have heard more this evening but for your frequent interruptions, you
were at the bottom of it all. And it is because you are always hanging
about the theatre that those wretched puppets are so constantly going mad
for love of one another."

He pouted and said I was making myself disagreeable and that there had
been plenty to praise him.

I replied: "Yes; you swallow the praise, but you won't listen to the
blame."

He said that as for the praise or the blame it was nothing to him one way
or the other. He was too much interested in the future of the race to
care about any of those old stories--they bored him--and, please,
wouldn't I leave off preaching and give him four soldi?

I replied: