“No,” answered Don Pietro gravely.  “He is certainly not a Christian.  But why should he spoil the tablecloth with his muddy hog’s back when my guests are at their meals?  He is always running under the table for the scraps.”

“And what are women for, except to wash tablecloths?” inquired the neighbour contemptuously.

But he got no answer.  Few people ever get more than one from Don Pietro Casale, whose eldest son is doing well at Buenos Ayres, and in whose house the postmaster takes his meals now that he is a widower.

For Don Pietro and his wife Donna Concetta sell their own wine and keep a cook-shop, besides a guest-room with a garret above it, and two beds, with an old-fashioned store of good linen in old-fashioned iron-bound chests.  At the time of the fair they can put up a dozen or fourteen guests.  People say indeed that the place is not so well managed, nor the cooking so good since poor Carmela died, the widow of Ruggiero dei Figli del Re—­Roger of the Children of the King.

For this is the place where the Children of the King lived and died for many generations, and this house of Don Pietro Casale was theirs, and the one on the other side of the cabbage garden, a smaller and poorer one, in which Carmela died.  The garden itself was once theirs, and the vineyard beyond, and the olive grove beyond that, and much good land in the valley.  For they were galantuomini, and even thought themselves something better, and sometimes, when the wine was new, they talked of noble blood and said that their first ancestor had indeed been a son of a king who had given him all Verbicaro for his own.  True it is, at least, that they had no other name.  Through generation after generation they were christened Ruggiero, Guglielmo, and Sebastiano “of the Children of the King.”  Thus they had anciently appeared in the ill-kept parish registers, and thus was Ruggiero inscribed for the conscription under the new law.

And now, as you know, gaunt, weather-beaten Luigione, licensed master in the coast trade and just now captain of the Sorrentine felucca Giovannina, from Amalfi to Diamante with macaroni, there are no more of the Children of the King in old Verbicaro, and their goods have fallen into divers hands, but chiefly into those very grasping and close-holding ones of Don Pietro Casale and his wife.  But they are not all dead by any means, as you know also and you have even lately seen and talked with one of the fair-haired fellows, who bears the name.

For the Children of the King have almost always had yellow hair and blue eyes, though they have more than once taken to themselves black-browed, brown-skinned Calabrian girls as wives.  And this makes one, who knows something more about your country than you do, Luigione—­though in a less practical way I confess—­this makes one think that they may be the modern descendants of some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for himself one morning