“Thanks, illustrious senator; I will obey your excellency; but my heart is full, and I would fain say a few words concerning the child, before I quit this noble company.”

“Thou mayest speak—­and here thou mayest give free vent to all thy wishes, or to all thy griefs, if any thou hast.  St. Mark has no greater pleasure than to listen to the wishes of his children.”

“I believe they have reviled the Republic in calling its chiefs heartless, and sold to ambition!” said the old man, with generous warmth, disregarding the stern rebuke which gleamed in the eye of Jacopo.  “A senator is but a man, and there are fathers and children among them, as among us of the Lagunes.”

“Speak, but refrain from seditious or discreditable discourse,” uttered a secretary, in a half-whisper.  “Proceed.”

“I have little now to offer, Signori; I am not used to boast of my services to the state, excellent gentlemen, but there is a time when human modesty must give way to human nature.  These scars were got in one of the proudest days of St. Mark, and in the foremost of all the galleys that fought among the Greek Islands.  The father of my boy wept over me then, as I have since wept over his own son—­yes—­I might be ashamed to own it among men, but if the truth must be spoken, the loss of the boy has drawn bitter tears from me in the darkness of night, and in the solitude of the Lagunes.  I lay many weeks, Signori, less a man than a corpse, and when I got back again to my nets and my toil, I did not withhold my son from the call of the Republic.  He went in my place to meet the infidel—­a service from which he never came back.  This was the duty of men who had grown in experience, and who were not to be deluded into wickedness by the evil company of the galleys.  But this calling of children into the snares of the devil grieves a father, and—­I will own the weakness, if such it be—­I am not of a courage and pride to send forth my own flesh and blood into the danger and corruption of war and evil society, as in days when the stoutness of the heart was like the stoutness of the limbs.  Give me back, then, my boy, till he has seen my old head laid beneath the sands, and until, by the aid of blessed St. Anthony, and such counsels as a poor man can offer, I may give him more steadiness in his love of the right, and until I may have so shaped his life, that he will not be driven about by every pleasant or treacherous wind that may happen to blow upon his bark.  Signori, you are rich, and powerful, and honored, and though you may be placed in the way of temptations to do wrongs that are suited to your high names and illustrious fortunes, ye know little of the trials of the poor.  What are the temptations of the blessed St. Anthony himself, to those of the evil company of the galleys!  And now, Signori, though you may be angry to hear it, I will say, that when an aged man has no other kin on earth, or none so near as to feel the glow of the thin blood of the poor, than one poor boy, St. Mark would do well to remember that even a fisherman of the Lagunes can feel as well as the Doge on his throne.  This much I say, illustrious senators, in sorrow, and not in anger; for I would get back the child, and die in peace with my superiors, as with my equals.”