“Buon di,” said he in cheerful Tuscan speech.  “Are you come upon a like errand of accommodation, by chance?  You are welcome to a corner of my dressing-room.  We’ll strike a bargain.  If you dip my beard, I’ll dip yours.”

I said that would be bad commerce on my part, since I had no beard.  “You, sir,” I added, “have a remarkable one, which I confess I regret to see coloured.”

“A fig for your regrets, little man,” said the other.  “Politics is the cry.  If your passport described you as a middling-sized man with a black beard and a running at the nose, you’d be doing as I am.  But you’ll never have such a passport as that.”

“My passport,” I told him, “is destroyed.  It described me as a young Jew with an assured manner and a pendulous nose.”

This caused the Capuchin to look upon his visitor.  Whether he knew me or not, then or before, he made no sign.  “There’s no flattery in that,” he said, “but you could have done it.  A manner’s a manner, and there’s an end; but I could swell any man’s nose for him and say thank you.  And what does your present passport bear?”

I said, “I have none.  The Holy Office having confiscated it, ejected me from Bologna because I wore a crucifix and prayed to the Madonna.”

“Ah,” says he, “I’ve known a man hanged in that city for less.  But what you say convinces me of one thing:  you will be all the better for company.”

“How so?” said I.

“Why,” says the Capuchin, “you tell me you were talking to the Madonna.”

“It is true that I was addressing her in her image.”

“Very well; that’s a proof positive to me that you had nobody else to address—­a most unwholesome state of affairs.  How does my beard strike you?  Black as blackness, I fancy.”

He was right.  I assured him that it was now as black as Erebus and pleased him extremely.  I told him, however, that I thought he would have more difficulty with the rest of his description, which gave him a middle size and a cold in the head.  He was, in person, gigantic, and in health appeared to be as sound as a bell.

“I shall get through,” said the friar, “on my beard, and where that goes I can follow as easily as a tomcat his head.  But I have a trick of bending the knees which will serve me for some hundreds of yards—­and if you suppose that I can’t snivel you are very much mistaken.  Listen to this.”  He hung his head, looked earnestly at the ground:  then he sniffed.  Sniffed, do I say?  It was as if all the secret rills of the broad earth had been summoned from their founts.  No noise more miserably watery could have proceeded from a nose.  He beamed upon me.  “Am I a wet blanket?” he cried.  “Now, friend, shall we go?” He had packed up his tools in his begging-bag and stood ready to depart.  I reminded him that I had no papers.