a cargo of pears? Good this year, like all the fruit. The figs and
grapes will not be dry for another month. They nod and move on, as you
pass by them. Verbicaro is a commercial centre, in spite of the pigs. A
tall, thin priest meets you, with a long black cigar in his mouth. When
he catches your eye he takes it from between his teeth and knocks the
ash off, seeing that you are a stranger. Perhaps it is not very clerical
to smoke in the streets. But who cares? This is Verbicaro--and besides,
it is not a pipe. Monks smoke pipes. Priests smoke cigars.

One more turn down a narrow lane--darkest and dirtiest of all the lanes,
the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal black
puddle. Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the Basso
Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of the
Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the
pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger and
street sweeper.

This is Don Pietro Casale's house, the last on the right, with the steep
staircase running up outside the building to the second story. And the
staircase has an iron railing, and so narrows the lane that a broad
shouldered man can just go by to the cabbage garden beyond without
turning sideways. On the landing at the top, outside the closed door
and waiting for visitors, sits the pig--a pig larger, better fed and by
one shade of filthiness cleaner than other pigs. Don Pietro Casale has
been seen to sweep his pig with a broken willow broom, after it has
rained.

"Do you take him for a Christian?" asked his neighbour, in amazement, on
the occasion.