He never
lost an opportunity of denigrating the island; he was determined,
absolutely determined, to see only the bad side of things, so far as
that place was concerned.
Regarding the pious relic, for instance,--the thigh-bone of the saint,
preserved in the principal church--he wrote:
"A certain Perrelli who calls himself historian, which is as though one
should call a mule a horse, or an ass a mule, brays loudly and
disconnectedly about the femur of the local god. We have personally
examined this priceless femur. It is not a femur, but a tibia. And it
is the tibia not of a saint, but of a young cow or calf. We may
mention, in passing, that we hold a diploma in anatomy from the
Palermitan Faculty of Medicine."
That was Father Capocchio's way: bald to coarseness, whenever he lacked
occasion to be obscene.
To Mr. Eames it would have mattered little, A PRIORI, whether the relic
was a femur or a tibia, a cow or man. In this case, he liked to think
it was the thigh-bone of a saint. He possessed an unusually strong dose
of that Latin PIETAS, that reverence which consists in leaving things
as they are, particularly when they have been described for the benefit
of posterity, with the most engaging candour, by a man of Perrelli's
calibre.
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