"Good Bianca! Excellent woman! I feel tired and wish to rest. Give me a glass of cinnamon water. Thanks, Bianca. Now let us recite our prayers; the Litanies will be enough for this evening."
Bianca took a book covered with crimson velvet, and clasped with gold; she knelt beside the bed, reciting the Litanies, to which Francesco replied very devoutly: "Ora pro nobis."—These being ended, Francesco uttered these words:
"Behold a day is about to end: we count them when they are past, when they are no longer ours; a day is now falling from the hand of time into the immense ocean of eternity. Before, however, it is lost in this abyss, let us look on its last moment, to judge what a life it has led. Go, go in peace, you also, O day of my life; take your departure boldly, and rejoin your brothers, who have preceded you: you are free from tears, you have passed innocently. The accusing angel will not write you in his eternal register. Rather, I may safely say, that if fortune had woven you into the mortal web of Titus, he would not have exclaimed: 'I have lost a day!'"
But who did this man presume to deceive? God? Himself?—O human heart, how dreadful art thou to look upon!
Francesco, with a heap of onions in his body, and two murders on his soul, went to sleep peacefully, "like a laborer in God's vineyard."
[CHAPTER VI.]
THE SON.
Ma il bacio della madre, oh! non ha pari,
E vivon mille affetti in quello affetto.
Oh! figli, figli lagrimati, e cari,