Every hour of that night the bells rang and masses sang throughout the city. All day Saturday the churches swarmed, and the purple veils, hung before the altar pictures throughout Lent, were rent from top to bottom to the sound of the wailing De Profundis. Sunday the religious world seemed to exhale itself in music and flowers and triumphant masses. Easter Monday morning the populace hurried through the necessary domestic duties at the earliest possible moment, for the Pasqua Flora is the day of villegiatura for all Palermo. Every one wears new clothes. Even the humble asinelli are, for once in the year at least, brushed and combed, and decorated with fresh red tassels if the master is too poor to afford more elaboration of the always elaborate harness. Those asses who have the luck to be the property of rich contadini appear resplendent in new caparison; with towering brass collars heavy with scarlet chenille, flashing with mirrors and inlays of mother-of-pearl, glittering from head to tail with brass buckles, with bells and red tags innumerable, drawing new carts carved and painted with all the myths and legends and history of Sicily in crude chromatic vivacity. Whole families stream countrywards in these carts to-day; babies clean and starched for once, grandmothers in purple kerchiefs tied under the chin and yellow kerchiefs crossed upon the breast, with gold 277hoops in their ears; daughters in flowered cottons, their uncovered heads wrought with fearful and wonderful pompadours, sleek and jet black. Along the seashore, up the sides of Pellegrino, in all the open country about Palermo, they spread and sun themselves, eat, sleep, make love, gossip, dance, and sing in the golden air. Gaspero drives slowly through the wide-spread picnic, pausing wherever a characteristic group attracts. Here lies a whole family asleep; gorged with endless coils of macaroni, saturated with sun—a mere heap of crude-coloured clothes, of brown open-mouthed faces, of lax limbs that to-morrow must be gathered up again for a hand-to-hand struggle for bread for another twelve-month. Under this tree a long table is spread with loaves, with meats, with iced cakes, and straw-covered flasks. A rich confrère of Gaspero celebrates the betrothal of his only daughter, a plump and solid heiress, who beneath an inky and mighty pompadour simpers at the broad jokes of her pursey, elderly fiancé. A solid fiancé, financially and physically. Altogether a solid match, says Gaspero. A dashing guest thrums his guitar and sings throatily of the joys of love and of money in the stocking. Here a group of very old men watch about a boiling pot hung above a little fire, and twitter reminiscences of youth, catching one last pale gleam of the fast sinking sun of their meagre, toilsome lives. Everywhere music and laughter and the smell of flowers and food and wine.