"When we reached the grotto--not here, but a larger one--the gentleman was very anxious that one of us should dive for money, and the ladies consented, as they sometimes do. Giuseppe who had discovered how much pleasure it gives foreigners to see us in the water, refused to dive for anything but silver, and the gentleman threw in a two lira piece. "Just before my brother sprang off he caught sight of me holding my bruise, and crying, for I could not help it. He laughed and said 'this time, at all events, I shall not see the Siren!' and went into the blue water without crossing himself. But he saw her." He broke off, and accepted a cigarette. I watched the golden entrance rock and the quivering walls, and the magic water through which great bubbles constantly rose. At last he dropped his hot ash into the ripples and turned his head away, and said: "He came up without the coin. We pulled him into the boat, and he was so large that he seemed to fill it, and so wet that we could not dress him. I have never seen a man so wet. I and the gentleman rowed back, and we covered Giuseppe with sacking and propped him up in the stern." "He was drowned, then?" I murmured, supposing that to be the point. "He was not" he cried angrily. "He saw the Siren. I told you." I was silenced again. "We put him to bed, though he was not ill. The doctor came, and took money, and the priest came and took more and smothered him with incense and spattered him with holy water. But it was no good. He was too big--like a piece of the sea. He kissed the thumb-bones of San Biagio and they never dried till evening." "What did he look like?" I ventured. "Like anyone who has seen the Siren. If you have seen her 'often and often' how is it you do not know? Unhappy, unhappy, unhappy because he knew everything. Every living thing made him unhappy because he knew it would die. And all he cared to do was to sleep." I bent over my note book. "He did no work, he forgot to eat, he forgot whether he had his clothes on. All the work fell on me, and my sister had to go out to service. We tried to make him into a beggar, but he was too robust to inspire pity, and as for an idiot, he had not the right look in his eyes. He would stand in the street looking at people, and the more he looked at them the more unhappy he became. When a child was born he would cover his face with his hands. If anyone was married--he was terrible then, and would frighten them as they came out of church. Who would have believed he would marry himself! I caused that, I. I was reading out of the paper how a girl at Ragusa had 'gone mad through bathing in the sea.' Giuseppe got up, and in a week he and that girl came in together.