lies at anchor an Italian gunboat. Opportunely again? I can but assure
you that it really and truly is there. It has been there for two days.
It delights the fishermen. They say it is `bella e pulita com' un
fiore.' They stand shading their eyes towards it, smiling and proud,
heirs of all the ages, neglecting their sails and nets and spars of
wood. They can imagine nothing better than it. They see nothing at all
sinister or absurd about it, these simple fellows. And simple Umberto,
their captive, strives to wheel round on his pedestal and to tear but
a peep-hole in his sheeting. He would be glad could he feast but one
eye on this bit of national glory. But he remains helpless--helpless
as a Sultana made ready for the Bosphorus, helpless as a pig is in a
poke. It enrages him that he who was so eminently respectable in life
should be made so ludicrous on his eminence after death. He is bitter
at the inertia of the men who set him up. Were he an ornament of the
Church, not of the State that he served so conscientiously, how very
different would be the treatment of his plight! If he were a Saint,
occluded thus by the municipality, how many the prayers that would be
muttered, the candles promised, for his release! There would be
processions, too; and who knows but that there might even be a miracle
vouchsafed, a rending of the veil? The only procession that passes him
is that of the intimidated orphans. No heavenly power intervenes for
him--perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for fear of offending the
Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously at his back, but
never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never rots it. There
is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a shame and incubus
to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted, yet made a fool
of; taken and left; a monument to Fate's malice.

>From under the hem of his weather-beaten domino, always, he just
displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and