robbery—­as how should we, who had nothing but rags and empty stomachs about us?—­we might easily starve, or keep the beasts from starvation.  There were wolves in these hills, and dogs, turned rogue, which were as bad or worse.  All this, however, we were ready to face so soon as we had eaten bread, washed ourselves at a well by the roadside, and commended ourselves to God.  “Come, brother,” I said, “our fortunes must needs mend since they can never be more broken.  In this world there is no stay, but a thing gets better or worse.  I believe we may be happy yet.”

“Brother,” replied Belviso, “I am sure of it, and I promise you I have never looked forward to happiness before.  This well in which I have washed myself is lustral water.  I have fouled it with the vile thing I was once.  In return it has made a new creature of me, thanks to God and you.”

“Bravo,” said I, “and now, Avanti!”

“Pronti,” says Belviso, and we struck east along a fine grassy valley where the trees were in the full glory of early summer.  I was full of hope, which I could neither explain nor justify, and though I did not know it then I had some grounds to be so.  I shall not inflict upon the reader the vicissitudes of our wearisome journey of three weeks over the sharp-ridged valleys of lower Tuscany.  We sometimes begged, sometimes worked for the bread we ate and the sheds in which we slept.  We were tanned to the colour of walnuts, healthy as young cattle, merry as larks in the sky.  We gave each other our full confidence, or so I believed.  At any rate I kept nothing from my friend.  He was more reticent.  “The past is past,” he used to say.  “My safety is only in the future; let me talk to you of that.”  And so he did.  A friendship was sealed between us which no difference of race, degree or age could ever break in upon; we loved each other tenderly, we were as brothers.  Belviso was at one and the same time the most affectionate, the shrewdest, and the most candid boy that ever was conceived in sin and nurtured in vice.  No shameful dealing had left a mark upon him, he was fine gold throughout.  But so I have found it always in this dear country of my adoption, that it takes prosperity, never misery, to corrupt its native simplicity.  The lower you descend in the scale of human attainment the greater the hopes you may conceive of what humanity may be permitted to attain.  The poor drab, the world’s hire for the price of a rush-light, the lurking thief, the beggar at the church door, the naked urchin of the gutter—­these, though they live with swine and are of them, have the souls of children new and clean from God.  Neither malice nor forethought of evil, nor craft, nor hatred, nor clamour, nor the great and crowning sin is in their hearts.  A kind word, a touch, a kiss redeems them.  Thus they, whom the tyrants of Italy have enslaved, are in truth the very marrow of Italy, without whom she would never have done anything in this world.  And the sorrowful verity is that slaves they must remain if Italy is to live on.  For prosperity, which fattens their bodies, chokes and poisons their souls.