It was an odd coincidence.

I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news of the proceedings
at a certain aviation meeting in the north, where a rather inexperienced
friend of mine had insisted upon taking a part; the newspaper reports of
these entertainments are enough to disturb anybody. While admiring the
great achievements of modern science in this direction, I wished
devoutly, at that particular moment, that flying had never been
invented; and it was something of a coincidence, I say, that stumbling
in this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable little side-streets in
the neighbourhood of the University, my glance should have fallen upon
an eighteenth-century engraving in a bookseller's window which depicted
a man raised above the ground without any visible means of
support--flying, in short. He was a monk, floating before an altar. A
companion, near at hand, was portrayed as gazing in rapturous wonder at
this feat of levitation. I stepped within and demanded the volume to
which this was the frontispiece.

The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly dirty hands
and face, began to explain.

"The Flying Monk, sir, Joseph of Copertino. A mighty saint and conjuror!
Or perhaps you would like some other book? I have many, many lives of
_santi_ here. Look at this one of the great Egidio, for instance. I can
tell you all about him, for he raised my mother's grand-uncle from the
dead; yes, out of the grave, as one may say. You'll find out all about
it in this book; and it's only one of his thousand miracles. And here is
the biography of the renowned Giangiuseppe, a mighty saint and----"