"pauper in ære suo;" lie had wherewithal to
live, and to keep a wife, too, in decent comfort
and quite respectable idleness. The house from
which he had just issued with that amiable son
of his was his own, and was a something more
than decent and respectable home. And then
the times! Amid the universal distress, and
misery, and precariousness, money was money,
even ever so little of it; and a home was a
home, even though shared with such a partner
as Signor Canacci. The matrimonial market,
like every other market, was dreadfully depressed.
Who thought of marrying in those
days of terror? Why, there were girls in every
street, very eligible ones too, orphans without
the assurance of bread to eat or roof-tree to
cover them for four-and-twenty hours to come;
and more dreading to become so with every returning
morning, and looking into the black
hopeless future with despairing eyes. How
many fathers of well-conditioned families, reduced
to ruin by the hardness of the times and
the stagnation of all business, looking, too, to the
probability from day to day of leaving an unprotected
daughter adrift upon the distracted
world of that miserable, reckless, and disorganised
society, would jump at the chance of
securing for them the snug and safe, though modest
competence, assured to the mistress of Casa
Canacci! "Yes, yes!" thought old Giustino to
himself, "if the times are good for nothing else,
they are good for finding a wife. Not much
danger of a refusal of a good home now-a-days!"

Pleasing himself with these reflections, the
old man went on his errand, walking firmly and
uprightly through the streets, now beginning to
have some stir and movement in them as the
hour of noon drew near.

Taking his way towards the Arno, he passed
across the large open square in front of the
church of Santa Croce. There, in one of the
houses forming the side of the square opposite
to the west front of the church, was situated
one of those places for the gratuitous distribution
of food, which had recently been established
in various parts of the city by the young grand-duke,
then in his twenty-third year, as a measure
of relief to his starving subjects. The
attempt was well intended; but, carried into
effect with the rude simplicity and ignorance
characteristic of the time and people, it was
not only as inefficient for good as those other
provisions against pestilence and famine which
have been alluded to, but, like them, was productive
of very serious increase of the calamities
it was meant to alleviate. A modicum of
the coarsest and cheapest food was given to
any applicant. Those who are not really pressed
by want, thought the prince and his counsellors,
will not seek so uninviting a meal. A modern
relieving officer would have known better. All
those who previously had, by dint of striving,
succeeded in obtaining wherewithal to keep
body and soul together, found it more agreeable
to do this at the duke's cost than by their own
exertions. And, of course, increased pauperisation
rapidly followed the establishment of the grand-ducal
relieving kitchens. It followed, moreover,
from the simplicity of the plan of giving
the food to the first comer, that those who were
least entitled to relief were by far the most
sure of obtaining it. The stout pair of shoulders,
that might have earned a bit of bread for their
owner, thrust aside the emaciated wretch already
half-starved, the aged crone, or fragile
girl, who had nought but an alms between them
and absolute starvation. And a scene of fighting,
screaming, pushing, despairing, cursing, was
daily reproduced in front of the distribution
places, which added a characteristic feature to the
other painful and disorderly sights and sounds
that made the streets of Florence horrible.

The hour of noon struck as Signer Giustino
was passing by that end of the large piazza. It
was the time at which the distribution began.
And immediately as the hour was struck from
the neighbouring tower of the Palazzo Vecchio,
the crowd, which had for an hour or
more been collected in front of the door, began
to sway and undulate as if shaken by a tempest
wind. Every voice was raised. The men cursed
and pushed, the women screamed and scratched.
There was small hope for the most helpless
and hopeless among them. Yet the first
served at the hatch-door that day was a woman
evidently half starved and old. With desperate
tenacity the miserable creature had clung on by
a huge iron ring on the door, and had so, despite
bufferings and imprecations, succeeded in keeping
the place she had secured by being the earliest
comer hours ago in the morning. Having
received her dole, which she forthwith enveloped
in a portion of the rags which hung about her
to secure it from the greedy hands around,
she was speedily and roughly hustled out from
the throng, and thus reached the outskirts of it,
half dead with long fasting, long standing, and
struggling. Then appeared the ruling passion
which had given the poor creature the force to
withstand the buffetings of the crowd and the
fatigue of the long struggle. Outside the crowd,
on a door-step close to the spot where old Giustino
stood amusedly looking on at the throng
fighting for life, on the "sauve mari magno"
principle, sat a wan emaciated figure, a girl of
some seventeen years, who had been pretty
once. To her the victorious mother brought
the mess of beans, the produce of her hard fight
and long endurance. It was only in a mother
that spirit could thus conquer matter in that
dire strife, for the starving girl eagerly devoured
the entire pittance, while the old woman looked
on with eyes in which the wolfish expression of
her own extreme animal need was strangely
blended with satisfaction at the relief of pangs
sharper to her than her own.

Signer Canacci laughed a sardonic laugh as
he looked on at the pair.

"Ah!" said he to himself, " now that is just
what I should like Caterina to see with her own
eyes. Yes, that is what girls no worse off than
she may easily come to now-a-days. Better, I
think, to be La Signora Canacci, with a good
house over one's head, and a decent meal on the