“Oh, you sons of snails and codfish, I will teach you!” growled Pasquale; and he proceeded to teach them, till they were all three howling at once.

Zorzi knew that they deserved a beating, but he was naturally tender-hearted.

“Pasquale!” he called out.  “Let them alone!  Let them make up the fire!”

Pasquale came back, and the yells subsided.

“I have knocked their empty heads together,” he observed.  “They will not sleep for a week.  Yes, the sand-glass has run out, but the fire is not very low.  I will bring you water, and when you are dressed I will carry you out into the laboratory.”

The boys did not dare to go away till they had made up the fire.  Then they took themselves off, and as Pasquale let them out he treated them to a final expression of his opinion.  The tallest of the three was bleeding from his nose, which had been brought into violent conjunction with the skull of one of his companions.  When the door was shut, and they had gone a few steps along the footway, he stopped the others.

“We are glass-blowers’ sons,” he said, “and we have been beaten by that swine of a porter.  Let us be revenged on him.  Even Zorzi would not have dared to touch us, because he is a foreigner.”

“We can do nothing,” answered the smallest boy disconsolately.  “If I tell my father that we went to sleep, he will say that the porter served us right, and I shall get another beating.”

“You are cowards,” said the first speaker.  “But I am wounded,” he continued proudly, pointing to his nose.  “I will go to the master and ask redress.  I will sit down before the door and wait for him.”

“Do what you please,” returned the others.  “We will go home.”

“You have no spirit of honour in you,” said the tall boy contemptuously.

He turned his back on them in disdain, crossed the bridge and sat down under the covered way in front of Beroviero’s house.  He smeared the blood over his face till he really looked as if he might be badly hurt, and he kept up a low, tremulous moaning.  His nose really hurt him, and as he was extremely sorry for himself some real tears came into his eyes now and then.  He waited a long time.  The front door was opened and two men came out with brooms and began to sweep.  When they saw him they were for making him go away, but he cried out that he was waiting for the Signor Giovanni, to show him how a free glass-blower’s son had been treated by a dog of a foreigner and a swine of a porter over there in the glass-house.  Then the servants let him stay, for they feared the porter and hated Zorzi for being a Dalmatian.

At last Giovanni came out, and the boy at once uttered a particularly effective moan.  Giovanni stopped and looked at him, and he gulped and sobbed vigorously.

“Get up and go away at once!” said Giovanni, much disgusted by the sight of the blood.

“I will not go till you hear me, sir,” answered the boy dramatically.  “I am a free glass-blower’s son and I have been beaten like this by the porter of the glass-house!  This is the way we are treated, though we work to learn the art as our fathers worked before us.”