. . .
But If Genuine Prophets Can Only Flourish Among The Malarious Willow
Swamps Of Old Babylon And Such-Like Improbable Spots, We Might At Least
Have Expected Better Things Of Our Modern Spiritualists.
Why should
their apparitions content themselves with announcing the decease, at the
Antipodes, of profoundly uninteresting relatives?
Alas! I begin to
perceive that spirits of the right kind, of the useful kind, have yet to
be discovered. Our present-day ghosts are like seismographs; they
chronicle the event after it has happened. Now, what we want is - -
"The Signore smokes, and smokes, and smokes. Why not take the tram and
listen to the municipal music in the gardens?"
"Music? Gardens? An excellent suggestion, Gennarino."
Even as a small Italian town would be incomplete without its piazza
where streets converge and commercial pulses beat their liveliest
measure, so every larger one contrives to possess a public garden for
the evening disport of its citizens; night-life being the true life of
the south. Charming they are, most of them; none more delectable than
that of old Messina - a spacious pleasaunce, decked out with trim palms
and flower-beds and labyrinthine walks freshly watered, and cooled, that
evening, by stealthy breezes from the sea. The grounds were festively
illuminated, and as I sat down near the bandstand and watched the folk
meandering to and fro, I calculated that no fewer than thirty thousand
persons were abroad, taking their pleasure under the trees, in the bland
air of evening. An orderly, well-dressed crowd.
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