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Novelle Rusticane was first published in Turin, in 1883.

D. H. LAWRENCE.

[Pg 11]

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[Pg 12]

[Pg 13]

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He didn't have his monk's long beard any more, nor his poor friar's hood, now that he got himself shaved every Sunday, and went out walking in his grand cassock of fine cloth, with his silk-lined cloak over his arm. And on those occasions when he was looking at his own fields, and his own vineyards, and his own flocks, and his own laborers, with his hands in his pockets and his little pipe in his mouth, if he ever did chance to recall the days when he washed up dishes for the Capucin monks and they out of charity put him a lay-brother's long frock on, he would make the sign of the cross with his left hand.

Yet if they hadn't taught him to say mass and to read and write, all out of charity, he would never have succeeded in wedging himself in among the first families of the place, nor in nailing down in his account-books the names of all those half-profits peasants who labored and prayed [Pg 14] to God and good fortune for him, and then swore like Turks when it came to reckoning day. "Mind what I am, not what I was once," says the proverb. Who he was, everybody knew, for his mother still did his house-cleaning. His Reverence had no family pride, no; and when he went to the baroness' to play at piquet with her, he had his brother to wait in the anteroom for him, holding the lantern.