not happy they would
have found life tolerable had they been able to work two days a week. And
one could divine that he was, at heart, fairly well content to go on
short commons, provided that he could live as he listed without fatigue.
His narrative and his manner suggested the familiar locksmith who, on
being summoned by a traveller to open his trunk, the key of which was
lost, sent word that he could not possibly disturb himself during the
hour of the siesta. In short, there was no rent to pay, as there were
plenty of empty mansions open to the poor, and a few coppers would have
sufficed for food, easily contented and sober as one was.

"But oh, sir," Tomaso continued, "things were ever so much better under
the Pope. My father, a mason like myself, worked at the Vatican all his
life, and even now, when I myself get a job or two, it's always there. 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, whos