e with them on fair
and open-handed terms; two masquerading figures on stilts, who had
snatched lanterns from the crowd, were swaying the lights to and fro in
meteoric fashion, as they strode hither and thither; a sage trader was
doing a profitable business at a small covered stall, in hot
_berlingozzi_, a favourite farinaceous delicacy; one man standing on a
barrel, with his back firmly planted against a pillar of the loggia in
front of the Foundling Hospital (Spedale degl' Innocenti), was selling
efficacious pills, invented by a doctor of Salerno, warranted to prevent
toothache and death by drowning; and not far off, against another
pillar, a tumbler was showing off his tricks on a small platform; while
a handful of 'prentices, despising the slack entertainment of guerilla
stone-throwing, were having a private concentrated match of that
favourite Florentine sport at the narrow entrance of the Via de'
Febbrai.

Tito, obliged to make his way through chance openings in the crowd,
found himself at one moment close to the trotting procession of
barefooted, hard-heeled contadine, and could see their sun-dried,
bronzed faces, and their strange, fragmentary garb, dim with hereditary
dirt, and of obsolete stuffs and fashions, that made them look, in the
eyes of the city people, like a way-worn ancestry returning from a
pilgrimage on which they had set out a century ago. Just then it was
the hardy, scant-feeding peasant-women from the mountains of Pistoia,
who wore entering with a year's labour in a moderate bundle of yarn on
their backs, and in their hearts that meagre hope of good and that wide
dim fear of harm, which were somehow to be cared for by the Blessed
Virgin, whose miraculous image, painted by the angels, was to have the
curtain drawn away from it on this Eve of her Nativity, that its potency
might stream forth without obstruction.

At another moment he was forced away towards the boundary of the piazza,
where the more stationary candidates for attention and small coin had
judiciously placed themselves, in order to be safe in their rear. Among
these Tito recognised his acquaintance Bratti, who stood with his back
against a pillar, and his mouth pursed up in disdainful silence, eyeing
every one who approached him with a cold glance of superiority, and
keeping his hand fast on a serge covering which concealed the contents
of the basket slung before him. Rather surprised at a deportment so
unusual in an anxious tr