to have much, it is fitting that it should be
recorded here.

It happened that a month or so after old Falcone had left us there
wandered one noontide into the outer courtyard of the castle two pilgrim
fathers, on their way--as they announced--from Milan to visit the Holy
House at Loreto.

It was my mother's custom to receive all pilgrim wayfarers and beggars
in this courtyard at noontide twice in each week to bestow upon them
food and alms. Rarely was she, herself, present at that alms-giving;
more rarely still was I. It was Fra Gervasio who discharged the office
of almoner on the Countess of Mondolfo's behalf. Occasionally the whines
and snarls of the motley crowd that gathered there--for they were not
infrequently quarrelsome--reached us in the maschio tower where we had
our apartments. But on the day of which I speak I chanced to stand in
the pillared gallery above the courtyard, watching the heaving, surging
human mass below, for the concourse was greater than usual.

Cripples there were of every sort, and all in rags; some with twisted,
withered limbs, others with mere stumps where limbs had been lopped off,
others again--and there were many of these--with hideous running
sores, some of which no doubt would be counterfeit--as I now know--and
contrived with poultices of salt for the purpose of exciting charity
in the piteous. All were dishevelled, unkempt, ragged, dirty, and,
doubtless, verminous. Most were greedy and wolfish as they thrust one
another aside to reach Fra Gervasio, as if they feared that the supply
of alms and food should be exhausted ere their turn arrived. Amongst
them there was commonly a small sprinkling of mendicant friars, some of
these, perhaps, just the hypocrite rogues that I have since discovered
many of them to be, though at the time all who wore the scapulary were
holy men in my innocent eyes. They were mostly, or so they pretended,
bent upon pilgrimages to distant parts, living upon such alms as they
could gather on their way.

On the steps of the chapel Fra Gervasio would stand--gaunt and
impassive--with his posse of attendant grooms behind him. One of the
latter, standing nearest to our almoner, held a great sack of broken
bread; another presented a wooden, trough-like platter filled with
slices of meat, and a third dispensed out of horn cups a poor, thin, and
rather sour, but very wholesome wine, which he drew from the skins that
were his charge.

From one to the other were th