here. We
were spoilt, you see, by those ten years of busy work, when we never left
our ladders and earned as much as we pleased. 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. And,
despite his physical decay, he retained an extraordinary head--the head
of an apostle and martyr, at once noble and tragic in its expression, and
encompassed by bristling snowy hair and beard.

"The Pope," he growled; "I've never spoken badly of the Pope. Yet it's
his fault if tyranny continues. He alone in '49 could have given us the
Republic, and then we shouldn't have been as we are now."

Ambrogio had known Mazzini, whose vague religiosity remained in him--the
dream of a Republican pope at last establishing the reign of liberty and
fraternity. But later on his passion for Garibaldi had disturbed these
views, and led him to regard the papacy as worthless, incapable of
achieving human freedom. And so, between the dream of his youth and the
stern experience of his life, he now hardly knew in which direction the
truth lay. Moreover, he had never acted save under the impulse of violent
emotion, but contented himself with fine words--vague, indeterminate
wishes.

"Brother Ambrogio," replied Tomaso, all tranquillity, "the Pope is the
Pope, and wisdom lies in putting oneself on his side, because he will
always be the Pope--that is to say, the stronger. For my part, if we had
to vote to-morrow I'd vote for him."

Calmed by the shrewd prudence characteristic of his rac