When the waiter
brought my breakfast I regarded it with resentful eye, feeling for
the moment very much like my grumbling acquaintance of the dinner
hour. It may be as well to explain that the breakfast consisted of
very bad coffee, with goat's milk, hard, coarse bread, and goat's
butter, which tasted exactly like indifferent lard. The so-called
butter, by a strange custom of Cotrone, was served in the emptied
rind of a spherical cheese--the small _caccio cavallo_, horse
cheese, which one sees everywhere in the South. I should not have
liked to inquire where, how, when, or by whom the substance of the
cheese had been consumed. Possibly this receptacle is supposed to
communicate a subtle flavour to the butter; I only know that, even
to a healthy palate, the stuff was rather horrible. Cow's milk could
be obtained in very small quantities, but it was of evil flavour;
butter, in the septentrional sense of the word, did not exist.
It surprises me to remember that I went out, walked down to the
shore, and watched the great waves breaking over the harbour mole.
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