Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/328

 man how much he will sell it for, just as it stands—harness and all, but not the horse."

The much-enduring Brown stopped, ran back, hailed the owner of the cart, who was accompanied by a dove-eyed wife and seven Saracenic children all piled in anyhow on top of each other like parcels. Never, probably, was a man more surprised than by the question hurled at him, but Sicilians retain too deep a strain of the oriental to show that they are flustered. He said in a strange patois that his cart was the pride and joy of the household; that it had been decorated by the one man in Sicily who had inherited the true art of historical cart-painting; that it was one of the best on the island, and he had expected it to remain an ornament to his family unto the third and fourth generations, but that he would part with it for the sum of one thousand lira. I beat him down until, with tears in his magnificent eyes, he consented to accept two-thirds, which really was more than the cart was worth, or than he had expected to get when he began to bargain. The cart was Miss Randolph's, and later that day I arranged about having it taken to pieces, boxed, and sent to New York. She was delighted with her purchase, and in such a radiant mood that she thought everything and everyone she saw perfect, from the men milking goats to the dramatically talented gardien of the beautiful old red-domed San Giovanni degli Eremiti, once a mosque.

The German Emperor is rather a hero of hers, and when we left the car in the street and visited the Palazzo Reale she was charmed to learn that he