"He was born in my house," Ercole said, when any one asked questions.
"Find a better one if you can. His name? I call him Nino, short for
John, because he barks so well at night. You don't understand? It is the
'voice of one crying in the wilderness.' Did you never go to Sunday
school? Or do you call this place a garden, a park, a public promenade?
I call it a desert. There are not even cats."

When an Italian countryman says of a place that even cats will not stay
in it, he considers that he has evoked a picture of ultimate desolation
that cannot be surpassed. It had always been Ercole's dream to live in
the city, though he did not look like a man naturally intended for town
life. He was short and skinny, though he was as wiry as a monkey; his
face was slightly pitted with the smallpox, and the malaria of many
summers had left him with a complexion of the colour of cheap leather;
he had eyes like a hawk, matted black hair, and jagged white teeth. He
and his fustian clothes smelt of earth, burnt gunpowder, goat's cheese,
garlic, and bad tobacco. He was no great talker, but his language was
picturesque and to the point; and he feared neither man nor beast,
neither tramp nor horned cattle, nor yet wild boar. He was no respecter
of persons at all. The land where the cottage was had belonged to a
great Roman family, now ruined, and when, the land had been sold, he had
apparently been part of the bargain, and had come into the possession of
the Signora Corbario with it. In his lonely conversations with Nino, he
had expressed his opinion of each member of the family with frankness.

"You are a good dog, Nino," he would say. "You are the consolation of my
soul. But you do not understand these things. Corbario is an assassin.
Money, money, money! That is all he thinks of from morning till night. I
know it, because he never speaks of it, and yet he never gives away