And now you are in the town.  The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is not Naples, not Salerno, not even Amalfi.  The pavement is of the roughest cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers.  Pigs everywhere, in the streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps of the church in the market-place, to right and left, before you and behind you—­like the guns at Balaclava.  You never heard of the Six Hundred, though your father was boatswain of a Palermo grain bark and lay three months in the harbour of Sebastapol during the fighting.

Pigs everywhere, black, grunting and happy.  Red-skirted, scarlet-bodiced women everywhere, too, all moving and carrying something.  Galantuomini loafing at most of the corners, smoking clay pipes with cane stems, and the great Jew shopkeeper’s nose just visible from a distance as he stands in the door of his dingy den.  Dirtier and dirtier grow the cobble stones as you go on.  Brighter and brighter the huge bunches of red peppers fastened by every window, thicker and thicker on the upper walls and shaky balconies the black melons and yellowish grey cantelopes hung up to keep in the high fresh air, each slung in a hitch of yarn to a nail of its own.

Here and there some one greets you.  What have you to sell?  Will you take a cargo of pears?  Good this year, like all the fruit.  The figs and grapes will not be dry for another month.  They nod and move on, as you pass by them.  Verbicaro is a commercial centre, in spite of the pigs.  A tall, thin priest meets you, with a long black cigar in his mouth.  When he catches your eye he takes it from between his teeth and knocks the ash off, seeing that you are a stranger.  Perhaps it is not very clerical to smoke in the streets.  But who cares?  This is Verbicaro—­and besides, it is not a pipe.  Monks smoke pipes.  Priests smoke cigars.

One more turn down a narrow lane—­darkest and dirtiest of all the lanes, the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal black puddle.  Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the Basso Porto in Naples smells far worse.  The keen high atmosphere of the Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger and street sweeper.

This is Don Pietro Casale’s house, the last on the right, with the steep staircase running up outside the building to the second story.  And the staircase has an iron railing, and so narrows the lane that a broad shouldered man can just go by to the cabbage garden beyond without turning sideways.  On the landing at the top, outside the closed door and waiting for visitors, sits the pig—­a pig larger, better fed and by one shade of filthiness cleaner than other pigs.  Don Pietro Casale has been seen to sweep his pig with a broken willow broom, after it has rained.

“Do you take him for a Christian?” asked his neighbour, in amazement, on the occasion.