to do with the story.  At present San Miniato is about thirty years of age.  His only known vice is gambling, which is perhaps a chief source of income to him.  Every one agrees in saying that he is the type of the honourable player, and that, if he wins on the whole, he owes his winnings to his superior coolness and skill.  The fact that he gambles rather lends him an additional interest in the eyes of Beatrice, whose mother often plays and who would like to play herself.

Ruggiero, who is to be San Miniato’s boatman this summer, is waiting outside the Count’s door, until that idle gentleman wakes from his late sleep and calls him.  The final agreement is yet to be made, and Ruggiero makes calculations upon his fingers as he sits on the box in the corridor.  The Count wants a boat and three sailors by the month and if he is pleased, will keep them all the season.  It became sufficiently clear to Ruggiero during the first interview that his future employer did not know the difference between a barge and a felucca, and he has had ocular demonstration that the Count cannot swim, for he has seen him in the water by the bathing-houses—­a thorough landsman at all points.  But there are two kinds of landsmen, those who are afraid, and those who are not, as Ruggiero well knows.  The first kind are amusing and the sailors get more fun out of them than they know of; the second kind are dangerous and are apt to get more out of the sailor than they pay for, by bullying him and calling him a coward.  But on the whole Ruggiero, being naturally very daring and singularly indifferent to life as a possession, hopes that San Miniato may turn out to be of the unreasonably reckless rather than of the tiresomely timid class, and is inclined to take his future master’s courage for granted as he makes his calculations.

“I will take the Son of the Fool and the Cripple,” he mutters decisively.  “They are good men, and we can always have the Gull for a help when we need four.”

A promising crew, by the names, say you of the North, who do not understand Southern ways.  But in Sorrento and all down the coast, most seafaring men get nicknames under which their real and legal appellations disappear completely and are totally forgotten.

The Fool, whose son Ruggiero meant to engage, had earned his title in bygone days by dancing an English hornpipe for the amusement of his companions, the Gull owed his to the singular length and shape of his nose, and the Cripple had in early youth worn a pair of over-tight boots on Sundays, whereby he had limped sadly on the first day of every week, for nearly two years.  So that the crew were all sound in mind and body in spite of their alarming names.