"Just now walking behind you hat in hand," said Pastafina, "I studied the shape of your head. In spite of everything you have the skull of an intelligent man; so I am going to talk seriously to you." Signor Pastifina expressed himself with as many gestures as an Italian station master trying to make a train start (at least at the time when Italian trains never did start). Not daring to smoke openly in the procession he hid his cigarette in the palm of his hand, like sentries on duty do. According as the quarters through which the hearse passed became poorer, the flowers covering it created more and more sensation. "He's got a fine escort," said the costermongers, nodding at the dead man, "but he's got to go all the same." "Listen. It's just the undertaking for a gambler, a lucky gambler. For you. I was born in Naples, but my parents were Sicilian, and I've always kept in touch with Sicily. You didn't know that? Well, what you are not unaware of is that as a result of the Visocchi Law, which applies both to the mainland and to Sicily, all large estates not under cultivation were expropriated in 1920 for the benefit of the peasants. Now I have a brother, Arsenio Pastafina, who, after prospecting in Mexico and returning ruined to his own country, became general secretary of our agricultural syndicate at San Lucido. Now follow me closely; in this Sicilian commune there was an estate of about five thousand acres belonging to the ducal family of Montecervato (a branch of the Palmi family) which was about to escheat to the State. Rather than this the owner preferred to sell it at a low price, and my brother bought it from him secretly. The property is four hours' mule ride from Caltabellotta, on the south coast; you follow a track bordered by fig-trees and those laurel trees that recall the arms of the first Siculi. Not one of your healthy-looking French roads, but one of those upward sloping southern roads covered with open sores like the back of an old donkey ..." (What with the Château d'Eau Barracks, and the pale sun caught in the network of overhead tram wires, the Place de la République was a horrible sight. Is there anything quite so out of place as this in Paris?) " ... sloping upwards, I say, beneath the sky transparent with heat and fringed with yellowish green on the horizon. You might almost think that there was already sulphur in the air. In the distance smoke rises from some sacrifice, one knows not what ... "Allow me to precede you along the road to show you the way.