‘Padrone mio, thank you,’ said the man, evidently determined, since he had found out a scholar, to keep close by him.

‘Seventeen!’ called out the tombola-crier.

‘C——­o!’ said the contadino, with joy in his face; ’seventeen is always my lucky number.  My wife was seventeen years old when I married her.  My donkey was killed by the railroad cars the other day, and he gave just seventeen groans before he died.  I shall have luck to-day.’

We refrain from writing the exclamation the contadino prefaced his remarks with, for fear the reader might have a good Italian dictionary—­an article, by the way, the writer has never yet seen.  Suffice it to say, that the exclamations made use of by the Romans, men and women, not only of the lower but even the middling class, are of a nature exceedingly natural, and plainly point to Bacchic and Phallic sources.  The bestemmia of the Romans is viler than the blasphemy of English or Americans.

It happened that the countryman had a seventeen on his ticket, and Caper marked it off, at the same time asking him how much he would take for his pantaloons.  These pantaloons were made of a goat’s skin; the long white wool, inches in length, left on and hanging down below the knees of the man, gave him a Pan-like look, and with the word tombola, suggested the lines of that good old song—­save the maledictory part of it: 

  ’Tombolin had no breeches to wear,
  So he bought him a goat’s skin, to make him a pair.’

These breeches were not for sale; they were evidently the joy and the pride of the countryman, who had no heart for trade, having by this time two numbers in one line marked off, only wanting an adjoining one to win the terno.

‘If you were to win the terno, what would you do with it?’ Caper asked him.

‘Accidente! I’d buy a barrel of wine, and a hog, and a—­’

‘Thirty-two!’ shouted the crier.

‘It’s on your paper,’ said Caper to him, marking it off; ’and you’ve won the terno!’

The eyes of the man gleamed wildly; he crossed himself, grasped the paper, and the next thing Caper saw was the crowd dividing right and left, as the excited owner of the goat-skin breeches made his way to the platform.  When he had climbed up, and stepping forward, stood ready to receive the terno, the crowd jeered and cheered the villano, making fine fun of his goat-skin, and not a little jealous that a contadino should take the money out of the city.

‘It’s always so,’ said a fat man next to Caper, ’these villani take the bread out of our mouths; but ecco! there is another one who has the terno; blessed be the Madonna, there is a third!  Oh! diavolo, the villano will only have one third of the terno; and may he die of apoplexy!’

A vender of refreshments passing along, the fat man stopped him, and purchased a baioccho’s worth of—­what?