To be offered an English penny for one lira! To be told quite seriously that it was a rare coin! And to take it in all seriousness; to go to the trouble of saying in an injured voice that it was only worth ten centesimi! Was this what he had fallen to? Was his sense of humour so far gone as this? Of course it was a rare coin! Had there not been times when an English penny would have saved him from the dire awkwardness of an impossible position. How about the chair in Kensington Gardens? How about the friend who mounted the ’bus with him in the cheerful expectation that he was going to pay? Of course it was a rare coin! Why, there were times when it was worth a hundred lire! He called the hawker back. "Give me that coin," he said. The man took it out with a grin of surprise. "It cost me half a lira, signor," he said, which was a lie. But he told it so excellently that John paid him his price. "Do you think they’ll find it worth a candle at the shrine of St. Anthony?" asked John. "You have lost something, signor?" He said it so sympathetically. "My sense of humour," said John, and off he strode to St. Mark’s, the hawker gazing after him. Without laughter in it, the voice is a broken reed; without laughter in it, the heart is a stone, dullened by a flaw; without laughter in it, even a prayer has not the lightness or the buoyancy of breath to rise heavenwards. Can there be one woman in the world who has never prayed to St. Anthony in all seriousness for some impossible request which, by rights, she should have enquired for at the nearest lost property office--for a lost lock of hair that was not her own--one of those locks of hair that she ties to the wardrobe in the morning and combs out with all the seriousness in the world? Surely there must have been one out of the thousands? Then why not for a lost sense of humour? There is no office in the world that will return you such valuable property as that, once it has slipped your fingers. He has the sense himself, has St. Anthony. Think of the things he has found for you in your own hands, the jewels that he has discovered for you clasped about your own neck! Why, to be sure, he must have a sense of humour. And if it is impossible to pay an English penny for his candle in an Italian church--an English penny, mind you, which has profited some poor beggar by the sum of one lira; if it is a sacrilege, a levity, to ask him for the return of so invaluable a quality as a lost gift of laughter, then why pray at all, for without laughter in it, even a prayer has not the lightness or the buoyancy of breath to rise heavenwards.