"No," answered Don Pietro gravely. "He is certainly not a Christian. But
why should he spoil the tablecloth with his muddy hog's back when my
guests are at their meals? He is always running under the table for the
scraps."

"And what are women for, except to wash tablecloths?" inquired the
neighbour contemptuously.

But he got no answer. Few people ever get more than one from Don Pietro
Casale, whose eldest son is doing well at Buenos Ayres, and in whose
house the postmaster takes his meals now that he is a widower.

For Don Pietro and his wife Donna Concetta sell their own wine and keep
a cook-shop, besides a guest-room with a garret above it, and two beds,
with an old-fashioned store of good linen in old-fashioned iron-bound
chests. At the time of the fair they can put up a dozen or fourteen
guests. People say indeed that the place is not so well managed, nor the
cooking so good since poor Carmela died, the widow of Ruggiero dei Figli
del Rè--Roger of the Children of the King.

For this is the place where the Children of the King lived and died for
many generations, and this house of Don Pietro Casale was theirs, and
the one on the other side of the cabbage garden, a smaller and poorer
one, in which Carmela died. The garden itself was once theirs, and the
vineyard beyond, and the olive grove beyond that, and much good land in
the valley. For they were galantuomini, and even thought themselves
something better, and sometimes, when the wine was new, they talked of
noble blood and said that their first ancestor had indeed been a son of
a king who had given him all Verbicaro for his own. True it is, at
least, that they had no other name. Through generation after generation