"It is prodigious and _antichissimo,"_ said an obliging citizen to
whom I applied for information. "There is nothing like it on earth, and
I have been six times to America, sir. The artist--a real artist, mind
you, not a common professor--spent his whole life in carving it. It was
for the church, you see, and he wanted to show what he could do in the
way of a masterpiece. Then, when it was finished and in its place, the
priests refused to pay for it. It was made not for them, they said, but
for the glory of God; the man's reward was sufficient. And besides, he
could have remission of sins for the rest of his life. He said he did
not care about remission of sins; he wanted money--money! But he got
nothing. Whereupon he began to brood and to grow yellow. Money--money!
That was all he ever said. And at last he became quite green and died.
After that, his son took up the quarrel, but he got as little out of the
priests as the father. It was fixed in the church, you understand, and
he could not take it away. He climbed through the window one night and
tried to burn it--the marks are there to this day--but they were too
sharp for him. And he took the business so much to heart that he also
soon died quite young! And quite green--like his father."

The most characteristic item in the above history is that about growing
green. People are apt to put on this colour in the south from
disappointment or from envy. They have a proverb which runs "sfoga o
schiatta"--relieve yourself or burst; our vaunted ideal of
self-restraint, of dominating the reflexes, being thought not only
fanciful but injurious to health. Therefore, if relief is thwarted,
they either brood themselves into a green melancholy, or succumb to a
sudden "colpo di sangue," like a young woman of my acquaintance who,
considering herself beaten in a dispute with a tram-conductor about a
penny, forthwith had a "colpo di sangue," and was dead in a few hours. A