however, the Englishman, considerably to his regret, was enabled or
rather obliged to add a postscript.

Many a time he cursed the day when his researches among the archives of
the mainland brought him into contact with the unpublished chronicle of
Father Capocchio, a Dominican friar of licorous and even licentious
disposition, a hater of Nepenthe and a personal enemy, it seemed, of
his idol Perrelli. His manuscript--the greater part of it, at all
events--was not fit to be printed; not fit to be touched by respectable
people. Mr. Eames felt it his duty to waive considerations of delicacy.
In his capacity of annotator he would have plunged headlong into the
Augean stables, had there been any likelihood of extracting therefrom
the germs of a luminous footnote. He perused the manuscript, making
notes as he went along. This wretched monk, he concluded, must have
possessed a damnably intimate knowledge of Nepenthean conditions, and a
cantankerous and crapulous turn of mind, into the bargain. He never
lost an opportunity of denigrating the island; he was determined,
absolutely determined, to see only the bad side of things, so far as
that place was concerned.

Regarding the pious relic, for instance,--the thigh-bone of the saint,
preserved in the principal church--he wrote:

"A certain Perrelli who calls himself historian, which is as though one
should call a mule a horse, or an ass a mule, brays loudly and
disconnectedly about the femur of the local god. We have personally
examined this priceless femur. It is not a femur, but a tibia. And it
is the tibia not of a saint, but of a young cow or calf. We may
mention, in passing, that we hold a diploma in anatomy from the
Palermitan Faculty of Medicine."