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 FEAST OF SAN SEBA ST/A NO 167
mante where no preparations were made. Donna
Elisa was deeply grieved at it, but she could not
induce Donna Micaela to have her house decorated.
41 How can you ask me to trim a house of mourning
with flowers and leaves?” she said. “The roses
would shed their petals if I tried to use them to
mask the misery that reigns here.”
But Donna Elisa was very eager for the festival,
and expected much good to result from honoring the
saint as in the old days. She could talk of nothing
but of how the priests had decorated the fagade of
the Cathedral in the old Sicilian way, with silver
flowers and mirrors. And she described the
procession : how many riders there were to be, and what
high plumes they were to have in their hats, and
what long, garlanded staves, with wax candles at
the end, they were to carry in their hands.
When the first festival day came, Donna Elisa’s
house was the most gorgeously decorated. The
green, red, and white standard of Italy waved from
the roof, and red cloths, fringed with gold, bearing
the saint’s initials, were spread over the
window-sills and balcony railings. Up and down the wall
ran garlands of holly, shaped into stars and arches,
and round the windows crept wreaths made of the
little pink roses from Donna Elisa’s garden. Just
over the entrance stood the saint’s image, framed
in lilies, and on the threshold lay cypress-branches.
And if one had entered the house, one would have
found it as much adorned on the inside as on the
outside. From the cellar to the attic it was scoured
and covered with flowers, and on the shelves in
the shop no saint was too small or insignificant to
have an everlasting or a harebell in his hand. Like
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