Fortunato was sure that he could “spika da Englishy,” though what led him to suppose so, other than a large command of illuminative gesture, never became clear. Some half-dozen words—adorned with superfluous vowels to a point of unrecognizability—he did possess; the rest was Sicilian, sympathy, and vivid intelligence, which sufficed to make him the perfectly delightful guide he explained himself to be. His age he declared to be fourteen, he looked all of ten, but his knowledge of the world, of life, of history, and of the graces of conversation could hardly have been acquired by any one less than forty. Within twenty minutes he had made them free of such short and simple annals of his career as he judged to be suited to their limited forestieri minds, having first firmly assumed the burden of all their small impedimenta—jackets, kodaks, and parasols. He was one of fifteen, he explained, and also the main staff of his parents’ declining years; the six staffs younger than himself being somewhat too short for that filial office. The other eight had been removed from this service by the 207combined ravages of marriage, the army, and emigration. When time and the growth of his juniors enabled him to lay down his absorbing duties he had the intention of joining in Nuova Yorka a distinguished barber, who enjoyed the privilege of being his elder brother. Nuova Yorka, he had been given to understand by this brother, boasted no such mountains as these of Girgenti, but its streets were filled for months with hills of ice and snow, and this information Peripatetica and Jane were regretfully obliged to confirm. No matter! even such rigours could not check his ambition to “barb,” and as his brother had explained how necessary it was that he should be complete master of Englishy before landing in Nuova Yorka if he hoped to escape being “plucked” (great business of illuminating gestures of rapacity) he employed in guiding Americans such brief hours as he could snatch from school. They discovered later that Fortunato snatched from school just seven entire days every week. It had been the intention of the two to spend the morning among the gigantic ruins of the temple of Zeus, and yet when Fortunato put pressure upon their ever flexible impulses at the gate of the strange old Panitteri garden, they found themselves instead under the walls of the church of San Niccola, where the gillyflowers and wild mignonette rioted from every crevice. Meekly they climbed a great stone terrace adorned with crumbling statues and Corinthian entablatures. Meekly they examined the great baths, and delighted in the shining panorama of sea and plain and hill, with golden Concordia seen in its most lovely aspect between two gigantic stone pines.