What passed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental
evasion of that repast,--bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment.
But at noon the household met to dine.

The dining-room, on the ground floor, long and low, with a vaulted
ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean,
bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour)
seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness. There
was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal
chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all
Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great
black and white Crucifix attached to the wall. But, by way of
compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with sunshine,
and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley,--the blue-grey
hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away
opalescence that you knew to be the lake.

At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.

The parroco was a short, stout, florid, black-haired, hawk-nosed,
fierce-looking, still youngish man, if five-and-forty may be reckoned
youngish, with a pair of thin lips and powerful jaws which, for purposes
of speech, he never opened if he could help it. Never,--till Sunday
came: when, mounting the pulpit, he opened them indeed, and his pent-up
utterance burst forth in a perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of
words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably lusty voice,
arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it
represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome. But on