ell as she could in our
great garret: we ate little, our bed was hard, and she and my grandam
labored hard to get a pittance. But when a rich bailiff sought her in
honest marriage, she kissed me and wept over me, and said again and
again, "No, no! To your father I will be faithful, let what will chance
to us."

The bailiff soon consoled himself: he married a big country wench who
had a fine rope of pearls and gold bracelets, and I continued to grow
up by my mother's side where the Tiber is gilded with the gold of the
dawns and rolls its heavy waves under the weeping boughs of its willows.
My boyish strength increased in the heat of the summers, and I grew like
a young brown stalk of the tall maize. I herded the cow, cut the rushes
and hewed wood, and I was always happy, even when my mother would send
me to the old priest to learn things out of books. She wished to make a
monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to
climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the
towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish
frock and a whitewashed cell? _Ouf!_ I put my fingers in my ears and ran
away whenever my poor mother talked of the cloister.

My limbs were always dancing, and my blood was always leaping, laughing,
boiling merrily in my veins. A priest? What an idea! I had never wholly
forgotten the glad, bright days of childhood when my father had thrown
me about in the air like a ball: I had never wholly forgotten the shouts
of the people, the sight of the human sea of faces, the loud, frank
laugh of the populace, the sparkle of the spangled habit, the
intoxication of the applause of a crowd. I had only been five years old
then, yet I remembered, and sometimes in the night I cried bitterly for
those dead days. I had only been a little brown thing, with curls as
black as the raven's wing, and they had thrown me from one to the other
lightly, laughingly, like a ripe apple, like a smooth peach. But I had
known what it was to get drunk on the "hurrahs" of the multitude, and I
did not forget them as I grew up here a youth in old Orte.

The son of an athlete can never rest quiet at home and at school like
the children of cobblers and coppersmiths and vine-dressers. All my life
was beating in me, tumbling, palpitating, bubbling, panting in
me--moving incessantly, like the wings of a swallow when the hour draws
near for its flight and the thirst for the south rises in it.