ere he, an undying hate, might clutch for
ever an undying traitor, and hear that fair smiling hardness cry and
moan with anguish. But the primary need and hope was to see a slow
revenge under the same sky and on the same earth where he himself had
been forsaken and had fainted with despair. And as soon as he tried to
concentrate his mind on the means of attaining his end, the sense of his
weakness pressed upon him like a frosty ache. This despised body, which
was to be the instrument of a sublime vengeance, must be nourished and
decently clad. If he had to wait he must labour, and his labour must be
of a humble sort, for he had no skill. He wondered whether the sight of
written characters would so stimulate his faculties that he might
venture to try and find work as a copyist: _that_ might win him some
credence for his past scholarship. But no! he dared trust neither hand
nor brain. He must be content to do the work that was most like that of
a beast of burden: in this mercantile city many porters must be wanted,
and he could at least carry weights. Thanks to the justice that
struggled in this confused world in behalf of vengeance, his limbs had
got back some of their old sturdiness. He was stripped of all else that
men would give coin for.

But the new urgency of this habitual thought brought a new suggestion.
There was something hanging by a cord round his bare neck; something
apparently so paltry that the piety of Turks and Frenchmen had spared
it--a tiny parchment bag blackened with age. It had hung round his neck
as a precious charm when he was a boy, and he had kept it carefully on
his breast, not believing that it contained anything but a tiny scroll
of parchment rolled up hard. He might long ago have thrown it away as a
relic of his dead mother's superstition; but he had thought of it as a
relic of her love, and had kept it. It was part of the piety associated
with such _brevi_, that they should never be opened, and at any previous
moment in his life Baldassarre would have said that no sort of thirst
would prevail upon him to open this little bag for the chance of finding
that it contained, not parchment, but an engraved amulet which would be
worth money. But now a thirst had come like that which makes men open
their own veins to satisfy it, and the thought of the possible amulet no
sooner crossed Baldassarre's mind than with nervous fingers he snatched
the _breve_ from his neck. It all rushed throu