The Feast of the Cricket
THE Grillo, in whose honour a great festival takes place on Ascension Day in Florence, is a bigger fellow than the cricket of our hearths or the grasshopper of our fields who holds so brave a place above the Royal Exchange. He is a noisier also, but then even the Italian nightingale has been compared to the angel of the Last Trump. It is curious how seldom this festival is Inentioned by naturalists. Fabre, in his Life of a Grasshopper, fails to speak of the Ascension Day cele- brations, though he decides that the cicadae kept as pets by Athenian children, worn as golden charms by Athenian ladies, and sung in Grecian verse, are not cicadae at all, but crickets ; and says that when he was a small boy he loved to coax these out of their burrows with straws, and keep them in cages on lettuce. In Provence, he tells us, a whole household will go into mourning when a pet cricket dies. He was evidently too wise a child not to know that the fly on horse-hair which many French children use as a bait is less effective than a straw.
In Southern countries, the caged cricket has an importance altogether out of proportion to its size. It figures in history and in literature. I feel sure that Garibaldi, when, as a boy, he shed tears over a lame cricket, wept for the ill-hap of a domestic pet, and drew omens from its catastrophe. There is an episode in Don Quixote where boys are found quarrelling over the caged cricket. Collodi, the Lewis Carroll of Italy, who, like him, wrote under a pen-name, records in The Adventures of Pinacchio a painful interview between his living boy-puppet and a grillo. Old- songs are still sung in the little creature's honour : indeed, his festival in Florence is one of the most ancient in Europe.
To see the fete at its best it is necessary to be out very early in the day. Soon after dawn the contadini arc pouring down from the Apennine villages, and making their way to the Cascine. Crowded tramcars, carts, peasants in red furred overcoats (they arc dis- carded very late) and women and girls in shawls of rainbow hues cross the bridges and throng the streets. Florentine children are out of bed betimes and searching the long grass of the great park stretching alongside Arno from the edge of the city to the Indian Prince's statue, in the hope of finding crickets. It is in the Cascine that the white oxen are housed which bear the carro to the Cathedral at Easter—their only working day in all the year. It, is here the races and the reviews are held ; many a pageant and many a tragedy have been enacted beneath these trees. Cars packed with flowers stream constantly towards the Cascine gates ; huge cattle with wide horns bring wine and provisions ; flower-decked bicycles dodge the toes of the pedestrians ; horses and mules are panoplied in scarlet, with brass trappings and nodding .feathers. Before midday, newspaper placards will pro- claim that a hundred thousand people have gathered in Grillo's honour.
Under the trees—perhaps under those very trees where Shelley wrote his Ode to the West Wind—are ambulance stations, camps of boy scouts, booths where gingerbread, cakes, streamers, fruit, sweets, balloons and toy windmills arc sold ; alfresco wine-bars and buffets are well patronized. At one stall a crowd " merry as crickets" (the simile is in Shakespeare) clusters round a performing monkey, which drinks out of a bottle, smokes a pipe, and at intervals rushes at the spectators with snarls and an ugly show of teeth. But the chief interest is the cricket. Vendors everywhere—some imitating the "gri, gri, gri" of their cry—are selling tiny cages of wood or gilded wire with chirping occupants on green leaves. Every child must possess one, and the longer the cricket lives, they say, the longer will the life of its owner be. Sometimes they live for months, but more often they come to untimely ends ; and small, tearful faces are to be seen at the fete itself, dismayed at the sudden deaths of their purchases.
There is a rush when the pageant of- the Grillo threads its way through the crowd. Among the cars we see a wagon bearing medical students, nurses, and a patient undergoing drastic cure ; on another is a man dresses! to represent a colossal cricket. By midday the flower- decked cars and bicycles, carts and carriages, are streaming back towards Florence. The Grillo has brought the Italian summer in.
ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD.
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