"Signor Albergatore," cried a squeaking voice, "open the door at your peril! Open it—and I shall lay the whole affair before his excellency, the president of the Grand Civil Court."
The innkeeper uttered a tremendous oath and opened the door. A blazing fire of billets and sticks roared up the opening which served for a chimney, and filled the whole albergo with a ruddy light. The host, a most forbidding-looking dog, with only one eye, a lip and nose slashed by what appeared to have been a sword-cut, and which revealed all his upper teeth, growled a sullen welcome: evidently nowise pleased with my splashed and miserable appearance. But I was resolved to make good my billet, and drawing close to the fire took a survey of the company: it consisted of an important little personage, whose face seemed the production of a cross between the rat and weasel; a jovial young fellow, whose jaunty hat and feather, green velvet jacket and breeches of striped cotton, rosy and impudent face, together with his little mandolin, declared him to be a wandering improvisatore; and an old monk of St. Christiana (the neighbouring town) who lay fast asleep in a corner, with his hands crossed on his ample paunch: his shaven scalp shining like a polished ball in the light of the fire, which made his white hair and beard glisten like silver as they flowed over his coarse brown cassock.
The little personage before mentioned was Ser Villani, the great notary of St. Eufemio; a more apt plunderer of King Ferdinand’s subjects than any robber in Calabria: he was a thorough-paced lawyer, and consequently a knave. Armed with a pass, which for a certain consideration he had obtained from General Regnier, he was on his way from Gierazzo, where he had been collecting information relative to an interminable process. The Grand Civil Court of Palermo was putting every judicial instrument in operation to plunder the rich Prince of St. Agata, at the suit of a neighbouring abbey of monks, whose relicario he was bound to keep in repair: he having neglected to enclose the parings of the nails of San Gennaro in a gilt box, these inestimable reliques were lost, and his altezza was deprived of his cross of the saint’s order, and became liable to swinging damages. All his notes on this most interesting case, Ser Villani carried in a legal green bag, which he grasped with legal tenacity; and he looked at me from time to time with glances of such distrust and dislike, that I concluded it contained more than mere paper.
