s favour. He was then a fine-looking priest, twenty-six years of
age, chubby, modest, and respectful. In less than a quarter of an hour
everything was satisfactorily arranged between them. The good old lady
counted out twenty-four sequins for one year of my schooling, and took a
receipt for the same, but she kept me with her for three days in order to
have me clothed like a priest, and to get me a wig, as the filthy state
of my hair made it necessary to have it all cut off.

At the end of the three days she took me to the doctor's house, so as to
see herself to my installation and to recommend me to the doctor's
mother, who desired her to send or to buy in Padua a bedstead and
bedding; but the doctor having remarked that, his own bed being very
wide, I might sleep with him, my grandmother expressed her gratitude for
all his kindness, and we accompanied her as far as the burchiello she had
engaged to return to Venice.

The family of Doctor Gozzi was composed of his mother, who had great
reverence for him, because, a peasant by birth, she did not think herself
worthy of having a son who was a priest, and still more a doctor in
divinity; she was plain, old, and cross; and of his father, a shoemaker
by trade, working all day long and never addressing a word to anyone, not
even during the meals. He only became a sociable being on holidays, on
which occasions he would spend his time with his friends in some tavern,
coming home at midnight as drunk as a lord and singing verses from Tasso.
When in this blissful state the good man could not make up his mind to go
to bed, and became violent if anyone attempted to compel him to lie down.
Wine alone gave him sense and spirit, for when sober he was incapable of
attending to the simplest family matter, and his wife often said that he
never would have married her had not his friends taken care to give him a
good breakfast before he went to the church.

But Doctor Gozzi had also a sister, called Bettina, who at the age of
thirteen was pretty, lively, and a great reader of romances. Her father
and mother scolded her constantly because she was too often looking out
of the window, and the doctor did the same on account of her love for
reading. This girl took at once my fancy without my knowing why, and
little by little she kindled in my heart the first spark of a passion
which, afterwards became in me the ruling one.

Six months after I had been an inmate in the house, the doctor found