When little Bethea next visited the hospital, the boy with the crooked leg was just leaving; but his leg was not crooked any longer; his face was bright and healthy, and safely buttoned up in his coat he carried a shabby old pocket book, in which lay a withered flower, with one word written underneath in large pencilled letters—"Heartsease."
A Story of Siena.
CHAPTER_I.
The house stands on a hill on the outskirts of Siena, not far from the high red walls that still enclose the town, as entirely as they did in the times long passed by, when Siena was the powerful rival of Florence.
Old frescoes, and the stone coats-of-arms of the dead and gone rulers of the place, decorate the great gates; which seem only waiting for a troop of knights and soldiers to pass through, and with a blast of their bugles awake the ancient inhabitants of the crooked streets, and fill them once more with the picturesque crowds of the middle ages.
We can imagine that the old owners are but lying asleep in their many storied gothic palaces, their vaulted courtyards, and shady loggias; ready to rub their eyes and come out as they hear the well-known sounds ringing across the wide piazza.
But the knights never come, and the old people go on sleeping; and the new people walk about the streets, and haggle at the market, and drive their country carts with the great patient white oxen, and crowd on Sunday up the broad Cathedral steps to kneel in the dim light before the lighted altar, as generations have done before them.