hed at by all, and
lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear and his cousin the
monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap.

I am Pipistrello, five-and-twenty years old, and strong as you see, and
good to look at, the women have said. I can leap and run against any
man, and I can break a bar of iron against my knee, and I can keep up
with the fastest horse that flies, and I can root up a young oak without
too much effort. I am strong enough, and my life is at the full, and a
day's sickness I never have known, and my mother is living. Yet I lie
under sentence of death, and to-morrow I die on the scaffold: if nothing
come between this and the break of dawn, I am a dead man with
to-morrow's sun.

And nothing will come: why should it?

I am only Pipistrello. The people have loved me, indeed, but that is no
reason why the law should spare me. Nor would I wish that it should--not
I. They come and stand and stare at me through the grating, men and
women and maidens and babies. A few of them cry a little, and one little
mite of a child thrusts at me with a little brown hand the half of a red
pomegranate. But for the most part they laugh. Why, of course they do.
The street-children always laugh to see a big black steer with his bold
horned head go down under the mace of the butcher: the street always
finds that droll. The strength of the bull could scatter the crowd as
the north wind scatters the dust, if he were free; but he is not, and
his strength serves him nothing: the hammer fells him and the crowd
laughs.

The people of this old Orte know me so well. Right and left, up and
down, through the country I have gone all the years of my life. Wherever
there was fair or festa, there was I, Pipistrello, in the midst. It is
not a bad life, believe me. No life is bad that has the sun and the rain
upon it, and the free will of the feet and the feel of the wind, and
nothing between it and heaven.

My father had led the same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his
spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze
before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time,
thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would
have thrown a ball or an orange.

My mother was a young and gentle creature, full of tenderness for her
own people, with strangers shy and afraid. She was the daughter of a
poor weaver. My father had found and wooed her in Etruria, and although
he h