They did not trouble themselves to stake out the line beforehand. They were going to begin at Diamante and gradually build their way to Catania. They only needed to begin and lay a little piece every day. It was not so difficult.
After that journey they began the attempt to build the road at their own risk. Don Ferrante had not left a large inheritance to Donna Micaela, but one good thing that he had bequeathed her was a long stretch of lava-covered waste land off on Etna. Here Giovanni and Carmelo began to break ground for the new railway.
When the work began, the builders of the railway possessed only one hundred lire. It was the miracle of the legacy that had filled them with holy frenzy.
What a railway it would be, what a railway!
The blind singers were the share-collectors, the Christ-image gave the concession, and the old shop woman, Donna Elisa, was the engineer.
In Catania there was once a man with “the evil eye,” a _jettatore_. He was almost the most terrible _jettatore_ who had ever lived in Sicily. As soon as he showed himself on the street people hastened to bend their fingers to the protecting sign. Often it did not help at all; whoever met him could prepare himself for a miserable day; he would find his dinner burned, and the beautiful old jelly-bowl broken. He would hear that his banker had suspended payments, and that the little note that he had written to his friend’s wife had come into the wrong hands.
Most often a _jettatore_ is a tall, thin man, with pale, shy eyes and a long nose, which overhangs and _hacks_ his upper lip. God has set the mark of a parrot’s beak upon the _jettatore_. Yet all things are variable; nothing is absolutely constant. This _jettatore_ was a little fellow with a nose like a San Michele.
Thereby he did much more harm than an ordinary _jettatore_. How much oftener is one pricked by a rose than burned by a nettle!
A _jettatore_ ought never to grow up. He is well off only when he is a child. Then he still has his little mamma, and she never sees the evil eye; she never understands why she sticks the needle into her finger every time he comes to her work-table. She will never be afraid to kiss him. Although she has sickness constantly in the house, and the servants leave, and her friends draw away, she never notices anything.