‘ONE must never lie, of course,’ said Padre Innocento in English, ‘but there are an amount of people here in Italy we allow to deceive themselves. The gentry on the frontier, for instance, when it is a question of tobacco.; and the dazieri who sit at the receipt of custom over there,’ and he waved lavishly at the toy roofs and towers of Borgo Sant’ Ignoto, five kilometres off in the valley. ‘There is a story of old Monsignor Scalabrin and how he outwitted the customs of his own town and took in duty-free the sausage of the Countess Villani. He had no bad intention, the good Monsignor. There was no sin. It was almost, you might say, the act of Providence. Besides, the Monsignor is in Venice and the Countess at Treviso; and the dazieri, though they are still at the same barrier, do not understand English. So if you like to write the story down, there will be no harm done; and it will be a page or two more for your book.’ I hastened to assure the good Father—who had frequently enjoyed the sweets of vicarious authorship through the inadequate medium of my pen and was, between ourselves, longing to see himself at one remove in print again—that I would make it my business to write out and publish the story of Monsignor Scalabrin as soon as I got back to England. So as we swung down the vine-screened cart-track that led from the mountain where he had said and I had heard Mass at the chapel of a mutual friend, he recounted the legend in the raciest English he could muster.