"When the sun began to sink down behind the mountains I realized that it was about time to find a place to sleep. I was at work on a 40 x 30--rather large for out-doors--and, as it would take me several days, I had arranged with a goatherd--who lived in a slant with stones enough on its roof to keep it from being blown into space--to let me store my wet canvas and my palette and box under its supports. I'd have bunked in with the goats if I'd had anything to cover me from the cold--and it gets pretty cold there at night. Then again I knew from experience that a goatherd's sour bread and raw onions were not filling at any price. What I really wanted was two rooms in some private house, or over a wine-shop or village store, with a good bed and a place where I could work in bad weather. I had found just such a place the summer before, on the Swiss side of the mountains, belonging to an old woman who kept a cheap grocery and who gave me for a franc a day her two upper rooms--and mighty comfortable rooms they were, and with a good north light. So I hung the wet canvas where the goats couldn't lick off my undertones, shouldered my knapsack, and started downhill to the village. "I found that the red-tiled houses followed a tangle of streets, no two of them straight, but all twisting in and out with an eye on the campanile, and so I struck into the crookedest, wormed my way around back stoops, water barrels, and stone walls with a ripening pumpkin here and there lolling over their edges, and reached the church porch just as the bell was ringing for vespers. When you want to get any information in an Italian village, you go to the priest, and if he is out, or busy, or checking off some poor devil's sins--and he has plenty of it to do--then hunt up the sacristan. "There must have been an extra load of peccadilloes on hand that night, for I didn't find his reverence, nor the sacristan, nor anybody connected with the church. What I did find was a chap squatting against one side of the door with a tray on his lap filled with little medals and rosaries--and a most picturesque-looking chap he was. His feet were tied up in raw hides; his head bound in a red cotton handkerchief, over which was smashed a broad-brimmed sombrero; his waist was gripped with another to match; his lank body squeezed into a shrunken blue jacket, and his shambly legs wobbled about in yellow breeches. The sombrero shaded two cunning, monkey eyes, a hooked nose, a wavering mouth, and a beard a week old. It was his smile, though, that tickled my funny-bone, and this happened when he held up the tray for my inspection--one of those creepy, oily smiles that spread slowly over his dirty, soapy face, like the swirl of oil and turpentine which floats over a basin of suds when you wash your brushes.