and leaped, and lifted an ox from the ground as easily as other men lift
a child. No doubt to the wise it seems a fool's life, to the holy a life
impure. But I had been born for it: no other was possible to me; and
when money rained upon me, if I could ease an aching heart, or make a
sick lad the stouter for a hearty meal, or make a tiny child the gladder
for a lapful of copper coins, or give a poor stray dog a friend and a
bed of straw, or a belabored mule a helpful push to the wheels of his
cart,--well, that was all the good a mountebank could look to do in this
world, and one could go to sleep easy upon it.

When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to
pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a
common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally
as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them
squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together,
quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from
sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with
the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and
improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me
said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never
was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and
the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been
shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were
burning.

One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under
June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a
sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I
had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see
her--I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than
my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot
here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so.

I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there,
the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths
of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own _contrada_.
We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania
and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte--dull, old,
gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart
beat an