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poor, saw them as souls in purgatory that see God and remain in torment, half in joy half in sorrow.
    Don Pietro’s poor have their feet in the mud and wait to be un-famished by providence, the sky is clear and nightingales are making new nests, the peach trees reflower and the orange trees in the gardens of the rich are pearled with new white blossoms.

    Don P.G. opened his door at ten A.M. every Friday. He pauses a moment on the threshold to make quite sure there are no infiltrations of poor from outside his parish limits.
    Then he emerges with his cloth purse containing the chicken feed.
    The men lift their hats, the women stretch out their hands, “God reward you in paradise” was the usual verbal manifestation of gratitude, when not augmented by other explanations, excuses, after the admonitions inseparable from the eleemosynary act.
    Don P.G.’s gabble annoyed the women particularly and he was specially and nauseously longwinded with widows. He required peculiar religious observance and exemplary conduct from widows.
    On Sunday Don Pietro said the ten o’clock mass and his poor flocked to the balustrade, otherwise no hand-out the following Friday.
    He came slowly out of the sacristy so as to have time to count his poor. The altar boy meanwhile put the missal on the reading stand, set out the cruets of water and wine, and stood patiently at the foot of the altar steps chewing over joyously the next week’s freedom consoling himself with the idea that the next week’s longwindedness would fall on the junior clerk his companion.
    Ten o’clock mass in San Lorenzo at the altar of the warrior saint Discoglio lasted an hour, invariably. That is until the start of the other
mass said by Don Caesar, the other thin priest. Don Pietro’s opposite in temperament and in habits.
    Don Caesar sang out of tune, had no manners, loose-jointed as the sandy cat from the nun’s pharmacy, he loped up the altar steps, his head moving on springs, his hooded eyes blinking against the candle light trying to find the rubrics in the missal, in fact rather like the royal blackbird in the Piazza butcher shop, pecking at the raw tripe which its owner stuffed through the wire bars of its cage.
    Don Caesar thin, tobacco stained, choleric, bungling, liberal, untidy, boozy, impatient at the door of the sacristy, his legs nervous, and tapping his heels on the stone step near the bell tower, with his eye glued on the altar of the warrior saint Discoglio, awaited for Don P.C. to get to the Salveregina and leave room at the altar.
    The little bell for Don Caesar’s mass broke in without manners on the opening words of Don P.G.’s Salveregina, and shocked the sensibilities of Don Pietro who despite his deafness always heard the bell and felt as if it were a set of rude words addressed to him personally, and thought within himself of blasphemy and the sin of him who approacheth the altar fasting but with his heart full of wrath and presumption.
    They passed midway before the High Altar, one with his eyes sparkling with hurry, the other lowering his so as not to look at him, and
seeming to nod to each other as they both bent head and knee before the sacrament of the Most High.
    Don Lorenzo, the abbé, was not an ordained priest and did not come in for the annuity.
    He had been to the seminary before his father’s death but had forgotten whatever scraps of Latin had been poked into his block. He had even forgotten the Paternoster and the Salveregina and when he served at mass he mumbled at random clucking in his throat like the women of the people when they try to join in the Latin litany.
    He had been thrown out of the seminary for keeping his hands in the slits of his soutane. Up till then his father had been supplicant, had begged the Archbishop time and again to find some way to consecrate him so that he could get the annuity, after which he promised to shut him up in a monastery so that with patience and