While getting our lunch one Sunday at the east end of the long room in the Sir John Falstaff Inn, Gadshill, we overheard some waterside-looking dwellers in the neighbourhood talking among themselves. I wrote down the following:—
_Bill_: Oh, yes. I’ve got a mate that works in my shop; he’s chucked the Dining Room because they give him too much to eat. He found another place where they gave him four pennyworth of meat and two vegetables and it was quite as much as he could put up with.
_George_: You can’t kid me, Bill, that they give you too much to eat, but I’ll believe it to oblige you, Bill. Shall I see you to-night?
_George_: Well, so must I; I’ve got to go.
So at Trapani, I heard two small boys one night on the quay (I am sure I have written this down somewhere, but it is less trouble to write it again than to hunt for it) singing with all their might, with their arms round one another’s necks. I should say they were about ten years old, not more.
I asked Ignazio Giacalone: “What are they singing?”
He replied that it was a favourite song among the popolino of Trapani about a girl who did not want to be seen going about with a man. “The people in this place,” says the song, “are very ill-natured, and if they see you and me together, they will talk,” &c.
I do not say that there was any descent here from Nausicaa’s speech to Ulysses, but I felt as though that speech was still in the air. [_Od. VI_. 273.]
I reckon Gadshill and Trapani as perhaps the two most classic grounds that I frequent familiarly, and at each I have seemed to hear echoes of the scenes that have made them famous. Not that what I heard at Gadshill is like any particular passage in Shakespeare.
At Castelvetrano (about thirty miles from Trapani) I had to start the next morning at 4 a.m. to see the ruins of Selinunte, and slept lightly with my window open. About two o’clock I began to hear a buzz of conversation in the piazza outside and it kept me awake, so I got up to shut the window and see what it was. I found it came from a long knot of men standing about, two deep, but not strictly marshalled. When I got up at half-past three, it was still dark and the men were still there, though perhaps not so many. I enquired and found they were standing to be hired for the day, any one wanting labourers would come there, engage as many as he wanted and go off with them, others would come up, and so on till about four o’clock, after which no one would hire, the day being regarded as short in weight after that hour. Being so collected the men gossip over their own and other people’s affairs—wonder who was that fine-looking stranger going about yesterday with Nausicaa, and so on. [_Od. VI_. 273.] This, in fact, is their club and the place where the public opinion of the district is formed.