Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE BELLS OF SAN PASQUALE ’
99
Pasquale picked up every little flint-stone, and when
he died, he took them all with him up to heaven,
and there he sits now, and throws them at everybody
who thinks of doing anything foolish.
But that is not by any means the only use that San
Pasquale is to man. It is he, also, who gives
warning if any one is to be married, or if any one is to
die; and he even gives the sign with something
besides stones. Old Mother Saraedda at Randazzo
sat by her daughter’s sick bed one night and fell
asleep. The daughter lay unconscious and was about
to die, and no one could summon the priest. How
was the mother waked in time? How was she
waked, so that she could send her husband to the
priest’s house? By nothing else than a chair, which
began to rock forward and back, and to crack and
creak, until she awoke. And it was San Pasquale
who did it. Who else but San Pasquale is there to
think of such a thing?
There is one thing more to tell about San Pasquale.
It was of big Cristoforo from Tre Castagni. He
was not a bad man, but he had a bad habit. He
could not open his mouth without swearing. He could
not say two words without one of them being an
oath. And do you think that it did any good for
his wife and neighbors to admonish him? But over
his bed he had a little picture representing San
Pasquale, and the little picture succeeded in helping
him. Every night it swung forward and back in its
frame, swung fast or slow, as he had sworn that day.
And he discovered that he could not sleep a single
night until he stopped swearing.
In Diamante San Pasquale has a church, which
lies outside the Porta Etnea, a little way down the
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