'Hee—ho—Hee—ho.' While his driver lustily thumped his shrunken sides, and yelled forth his guttural:—
'Arri—Arri!'
A long string of blind persons with sticks, and guides, chanted a doleful and tedious supplication. A street-dentist, his hat ornamented with a chaplet of teeth, was standing over a man whose head he held between his knees, and with the rapid movements of a juggler, was drawing his teeth with huge pincers. Children were spinning tops under the feet of the pedestrians, and teasing a Jew with offers of a pig's head; Farfanicchio, the leader of the scamps, had let a mouse loose among the market-women. It rushed up the ample petticoats of Barbacchia, the fruit-seller, who jumped up as if she had been scalded, cursing the ragamuffins, and shaking her garments regardless of propriety.
A porter, carrying a pig's carcase, turned round suddenly to see the fun, and terrified the horse of Messer Gabbadeo, the surgeon; it reared and plunged, and overturned a whole pile of kitchenware in the booth beside it; saucepans, frying-pans, skimmers, graters, rolled over with a deafening crash; the horse bolted and carried away the terrified surgeon, his arms round its neck, his great bass voice alternately imploring God and the devil to rescue him. The dogs barked, curious faces were thrust from windows; laughter, cries, curses, whistling, shouting rose on all sides; and the donkeys brayed from every side of the square.
Watching this diverting spectacle, the shoemaker said to himself philosophically:—
'The world would be a good place enough, if it were not for the women, who devour their husbands as rust devours iron.'
Then shading his eyes with his hand, he looked up at the vast unfinished pile surrounded with scaffolding. This was the great cathedral, the magnificent temple which Milan was erecting in honour of the Birth of the Virgin. All, small and great, had contributed to the shrine. The queen of Cyprus had sent a precious cloth embroidered with gold. Caterina, the old rag-woman, had laid on the altar of the Virgin her only cloak, worth twenty soldi. Corbolo, who from his childhood had watched the progress of the building, saw this morning a new pinnacle, and rejoiced.
All around was heard the tapping of mallets and hammers. The immense blocks of sparkling marble brought from the quarries on the Lago Maggiore were landed on the wharf at Laghetto de Santo Stefano, not far from the Ospedale Maggiore, and were still arriving at the building; cranes creaked and rattled their chains, iron saws grated on the marble, the workmen swarmed around the scaffolding like flies. And daily the great temple was growing, with its countless spires, its belfries and turrets of pure white gleaming against the azure heavens; a perpetual hymn raised by the people of Milan to the glory of Maria Nascente.