In another moment the present would have slipped from him; he would have been one of the crowd upon the Piazetta, watching the glorious argosy of Domenico Michieli returning from the Holy Land, with its sacred burdens of the bodies of St. Isidore from Chios and S. Donato from Cephalonia; in another moment he would have been seeing them unload their wondrous spoils of the East, their scents and their spices, their silks and their sandalwood, had not a most modern of modern hawkers, his little tray slung by straps from his shoulder, chosen him out for prey.
"Rare coins, signor," he said--"coins from every country in the world."
And for the price of one lira, he offered John an English penny.
John looked him up and down.
"Is this your idea of humour?" he asked in Italian.
The man emphatically shook his head.
"Oh, no, signor! It is a rare coin."
John turned away in disgust.
"You'd better go and learn your business," he said. "That's an English penny. It's only worth ten centesimi."
The hawker shrugged his shoulders and walked away. He had got the coin from a Greek whose ship lay in the Giudecca there. It was no good saying what the Greek had said. The signor would never believe him. He cast a wandering eye at the ships and shrugged his shoulders once more.