That Any One Should Journey From Calabria To
England Seemed To Him Intelligible Enough; But He Marvelled That I
Had Thought It Worth While To Come From England To Calabria.
Very
rarely indeed could he show his garden to one from a far-off
country; no, the place was too poor, accommodation too rough; there
needed a certain courage, and he laughed, again shaking his head.
The ordinary graves were marked with a small wooden cross; where a
head-stone had been raised, it generally presented a skull and
crossed bones. Round the enclosure stood a number of mortuary
chapels, gloomy and ugly. An exception to this dull magnificence in
death was a marble slab, newly set against the wall, in memory of a
Lucifero - one of that family, still eminent, to which belonged the
sacrilegious bishop. The design was a good imitation of those noble
sepulchral tablets which abound in the museum at Athens; a figure
taking leave of others as if going on a journey. The Lucifers had
shown good taste in their choice of the old Greek symbol; no better
adornment of a tomb has ever been devised, nor one that is half so
moving. At the foot of the slab was carved a little owl (civetta), a
bird, my friend informed me, very common about here.
When I took leave, the kindly fellow gave me a large bunch of
flowers, carefully culled, with many regrets that the lateness of
the season forbade his offering choicer blossoms.
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