bling
and chess, both of which the girls and youths of the Decameron seem to
have included in one contemptuous condemnation when they elected to
spend their time in telling stories. The younger men of the household,
of course, when not actually fighting, passed a certain number of hours
in the practice of horsemanship and arms; but the only real excitement
they knew was in love and war, the latter including everything between
the battles of the Popes and Emperors, and the street brawls of private
enemies, which generally drew blood and often ended in a death.

It does not appear that the idea of 'housekeeping' as the chief
occupation of the Baron's wife ever entered into the Roman mind. In
northern countries there has always been more equality between men and
women, more respect for woman as an intelligent being, and less care for
her as a valuable possession to be guarded against possible attacks from
without. In Rome and the south of Italy the women in a great household
were carefully separated from the men, and beyond the outer halls in
which visitors were received, business transacted and politics
discussed, there were closed doors, securely locked, leading to the
women's apartments beyond. In every Roman palace and fortress there was
a revolving 'dumb-waiter' between the women's quarters and the men's,
called the 'wheel,' and used as a means of communication. Through this
the household supplies were daily handed in, for the cooking was very
generally done by women, and through the same machine the prepared food
was passed out to the men, the wheel being so arranged that men and
women could not see each other, though they might hear each other speak.
To all intents and purposes the system was oriental and the women were
shut up in a harem. The use of the dumb-waiter survived the revolution
in manners under the Renascence, and the wheel itself remains as a
curiosity of past times in more than one Roman dwelling today. It had
its uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up
an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection
as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he
could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for
highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and
death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy
the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle,
where