“Thy words forebode disaffection, as of wont.  Thou art accustomed to comment on measures and interests that are beyond thy limited reason, and thou knowest that thy opinions have already drawn displeasure on thee.  The ignorant and the low are, to the state, as children, whose duty it is to obey, and not to cavil.  Thy errand?”

“I am not the man you think me, Signore.  I am used to poverty and want, and little satisfies my wishes.  The senate is my master, and as such I honor it; but a fisherman hath his feelings as well as the Doge!”

“Again!  These feelings of thine, Antonio, are most exacting.  Thou namest them on all occasions, as if they were the engrossing concerns of life.”

“Signore, are they not to me?  Though I think mostly of my own concerns, still I can have a thought for the distress of those I honor.  When the beautiful and youthful lady, your eccellenza’s daughter, was called away to the company of the saints, I felt the blow as if it had been the death of my own child; and it has pleased God, as you very well know, Signore, not to leave me unacquainted with the anguish of such a loss.”

“Thou art a good fellow, Antonio,” returned the senator, covertly removing the moisture from his eyes; “an honest and a proud man, for thy condition!”

“She from whom we both drew our first nourishment, Signore, often told me, that next to my own kin, it was my duty to love the noble race she had helped to support.  I make no merit of natural feeling, which is a gift from Heaven, and the greater is the reason that the state should not deal lightly with such affections.”

“Once more the state!  Name thy errand.”

“Your eccellenza knows the history of my humble life.  I need not tell you, Signore, of the sons which God, by the intercession of the Virgin and blessed St. Anthony, was pleased to bestow on me, or of the manner in which he hath seen proper to take them one by one away.”

“Thou hast known sorrow, poor Antonio; I well remember thou hast suffered, too.”

“Signore, I have.  The deaths of five manly and honest sons is a blow to bring a groan from a rock.  But I have known how to bless God, and be thankful!”

“Worthy fisherman, the Doge himself might envy this resignation.  It is often easier to endure the loss than the life of a child, Antonio!”

“Signore, no boy of mine ever caused me grief, but the hour in which he died.  And even then”—­the old man turned aside to conceal the working of his features—­“I struggled to remember from how much pain, and toil, and suffering they were removed to enjoy a more blessed state.”

The lip of the Signer Gradenigo quivered, and he moved to and fro with a quicker step.

“I think, Antonio,” he said, “I think, honest Antonio, I had masses said for the souls of them all?”

“Signore, you had; St. Anthony remember the kindness in your own extremity!  I was wrong in saying that the youths never gave me sorrow but in dying, for there is a pain the rich cannot know, in being too poor to buy a prayer for a dead child!”