The lime-dealer objected to the Saint Joseph's ass because it was covered with worse scars than his other beasts, with its legs seared by the hot iron, and the skin on its chest worn off by the poitrel, and the withers raw by the chafing of the plow, and the knees barked by constant falls, and then that pelt of black and white seemed to him so inharmonious among his other brown-skinned animals.
"That makes no difference," replied _compare_ Luciano. "Besides, it will serve to distinguish your asses at a distance."
But he deducted two _tarì_ from the seven _lire_ that he had asked, so as to bring the business to a settlement.
Now the Saint Joseph's ass would not have been recognized even by the _padrona_ who had been present when it was born, so greatly had it changed as it stumbled along with its nose to the ground and its ears curled over like an umbrella under the lime-dealer's heavy sacks, twitching its flanks under the blows of the youth who drove the caravan. But then the _padrona_ herself was changed at that time, what with the bad harvests they had gathered and the hunger from which she had suffered, and the fevers which they had all contracted in the low lands, she and her husband and her Turiddu, while they had no money to buy any more quinine at the apothecary's and at the same time they had no more asses even of the Saint Joseph kind to sell for the small price of thirty-five _lire_!
In winter, when there was little work and the wood for burning the lime was scarce, and to be had only at a distance, and the frozen paths hadn't a leaf on their hedges or a mouthful of stubble along by the icy gutters, life was still harder for those poor brutes, and the _padrone_ knew that in winter not half as much was eaten; so he used to buy a good stock of provisions in the spring.
At night the drove remained in the open air near the lime-burners, and the brutes clustered together for protection against the cold. But those stars shining like swords through and through them in spite of their thick hides, and all those ulcer-eaten beasts shook and trembled in the cold as if they were human beings.
But then there are many Christians who are not better off, not having even such a ragged coat as that wrapt up in which the herd-boy slept before the furnace.