When Our Red Is To Be Signified, They Will Use The Word "Turco," Which Came In With The Well-Known Dye-Stuff Of Which The Turks Once Monopolized The Secret.

Thus there are "Turkish" apples and "Turkish" potatoes.

But "turco" may also mean black - in accordance with the tradition that the Turks, the Saracens, were a black race. Snakes, generally greyish-brown in these parts, are described as either white or black; an eagle-owl is half-black; a kestrel un quasi bianco. The mixed colours of cloths or silks are either beautiful or ugly, and there's an end of it. It is curious to compare this state of affairs with that existing in the days of Homer, who was, as it were, feeling his way in a new region, and the propriety of whose colour epithets is better understood when one sees things on the spot. Of course I am only speaking of the humble peasant whose blindness, for the rest, is not incurable.

One might enlarge the argument and deduce his odd insensibility to delicate scents from the fact that he thrives in an atmosphere saturated with violent odours of all kinds; his dullness in regard to finer shades of sound - from the shrieks of squalling babies and other domestic explosions in which he lives from the cradle to the grave. That is why these people have no "nerves"; terrific bursts of din, such as the pandemonium of Piedigrotta, stimulate them in the same way that others might be stimulated by a quartette of Brahms. And if they who are so concerned about the massacre of small birds in this country would devote their energies to the invention of a noiseless and yet cheap powder, their efforts would at last have some prospects of success. For it is not so much the joy of killing, as the pleasurable noise of the gun, which creates these local sportsmen; as the sagacious "Ultramontain" observed long ago. "Le napolitain est pas-sionne pour la chasse," he says, "parce que les coups de fusil flattent son oreille." [Footnote: I have looked him up in Jos. Blanc's "Bibliographic." His name was C. Haller.] This ingenuous love of noise may be connected, in some way, with their rapid nervous discharges.

I doubt whether intermediate convulsions have left much purity of Greek blood in south Italy, although emotional travellers, fresh from the north, are for ever discovering "classic Hellenic profiles" among the people. There is certainly a scarce type which, for want of a better hypothesis, might be called Greek: of delicate build and below the average height, small-eared and straight-nosed, with curly hair that varies from blonde to what Italians call castagno chiaro. It differs not only from the robuster and yet fairer northern breed, but also from the darker surrounding races. But so many contradictory theories have lately been promulgated on this head, that I prefer to stop short at the preliminary question - did a Hellenic type ever exist? No more, probably, than that charming race which the artists of Japan have invented for our delectation.

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