Passing at about two in the afternoon of the following day through the Piazza del Ponterosso, where there was, and still is, a market for birds and live poultry, Odone, who had left home to return to work and loiter a little on the way, quite determined not to go back to his prison a moment too soon, stopped to observe the merchandise displayed in the cages. First, he was struck by certain exotic little birds with bright shiny colours, which reminded him of the stamps from the English colonies and the barbaric states which he often admired in his modest collection; then his desire came to rest on a blackbird, a totally mysterious-looking animal, from whose golden beak half a dozen little worms were struggling to escape, while the bird swallowed them no more than one at a time, at regular intervals, half closing with pleasure its round little eyes encircled with the same fine gold as the beak; he looked with scant sympathy at the parrots, and with revulsion at a monkey; finally, his attention was drawn to the chickens, packed closely together in their cramped wooden cages, from which their necks stuck out alternately, and where they complained bitterly or took it out on one another for the thirst and lack of space. It was not the glutton in him that was moved by this spectacle: Odone liked live hens very much, but they were a matter of more than indifference to him when served at table. When on a solitary walk in the country, one of those adolescent walks that have the length of a forced march and the solemnity of a conquest, he would spot crests and wattles in front of a farmhouse or amid the green of the meadows, he would cheer up at the sight, as if they were brushstrokes in which the feeling of the landscape was concentrated; and he would gladly stroke the hen who was sufficiently tame or rendered so awkward by fear as not to escape in time from his lovingly held-out hand. Where others hear only monotonous, unpleasant sounds, Odone listened to the voices of the henhouse as if they were constantly varied music, especially as evening fell and the drowsy hens would complain in a very gentle manner. He did not like roosters as much. The pride and magnanimity of these sultans of the farmyard, shown when faced with a caterpillar or some other exquisite morsel which is lusted after and then, not without a visible inner struggle, left to the females, can only be appreciated by a man already expert in life, capable of understanding the nobility of that renunciation and the masculine lordliness that lies behind every true sacrifice. If at that time anyone had asked him why he was so fond of those stupid birds, which others only associate with thoughts of gastronomy, the young man might not have known what to reply. To the many who did in fact ask him, he only replied twenty years later, in a poem; only, that, too, was little understood.