"It would have been such good practice!" An hour later Bastianello was sitting alone in the boat, under the awning, enjoying the cool breeze and wishing that the ladies would go for a sail while it lasted, instead of waiting until late in the afternoon as they generally did, at which time there was usually not a breath of air on the water.

He was smoking a clay pipe with a cane stem, and he was thinking vaguely of Teresina, wondering whether Ruggiero would never speak to her, and if he never did, whether he, Bastianello, might not at last have his turn.
A number of small boys were bathing in the bright sunshine, diving off the stones of the breakwater and running along the short pier, brown urchins with lithe thin limbs, matted black hair and beady eyes.
Suddenly Bastianello was aware of a small dark face and two little hands holding upon the gunwale of his boat.

He knew the boy very well, for he was the son of the Son of the Fool.
"Let go, Nenne!" he said; "do you take us for a bathing house ?" "You have a beautiful pair of padroni, you and your brother," observed Nenne, making a hideous face over the boat's side.
Bastianello did not move, but stretched out his long arm to take up the boat-hook, which lay within his reach.
"If you had seen what I saw in the garden up there just now," continued the small boy.

"Madonna mia, what a business!" "Eh, you rascal?
what did you see ?" asked the sailor, turning the boat-hook round and holding it so that he could rap the boy's knuckles with the butt end of it.
"There was the Count, who is Ruggiero's padrone, trying to kiss your signora's maid, and offering her the gold, and she--yah!" Another hideous grimace, apparently of delight, interrupted the narrative.
"What did she do ?" asked Bastianello quietly.

But he grew a shade paler.
"Eh?
you want to know now, do you?
What will you give me ?" inquired the urchin.
"Half a cigar," said Bastianello, who knew the boy's vicious tastes, and forthwith produced the bribe from his cap, holding it up for the other to see.
"What did she do?
She threw down the gold and called him an infamous liar to his face.