Of course, we fed ourselves better, and bought ourselves clothes, and took such pleasure as we cared for; so that it's all the harder nowadays to have to stint ourselves.

But if you'd only come to see us in the Pope's time! No taxes, everything to be had for nothing, so to say--why, one merely had to let oneself live." At this moment a growl arose from one of the palliasses lying in the shade of the boarded windows, and the mason, in his slow, quiet way, resumed: "It's my brother Ambrogio, who isn't of my opinion.
"He was with the Republicans in '49, when he was fourteen.

But it doesn't matter; we took him with us when we heard that he was dying of hunger and sickness in a cellar." The visitors could not help quivering with pity.

Ambrogio was the elder by some fifteen years; and now, though scarcely sixty, he was already a ruin, consumed by fever, his legs so wasted that he spent his days on his palliasse without ever going out.

Shorter and slighter, but more turbulent than his brother, he had been a carpenter by trade.