“Ach!” groaned the voice in German. “Only an accursed Italian.”
“Here, friend,” I shouted in German, poking the form with my foot. “Whom are you calling accursed?”
The man in the husks sprang to his feet with a wild shout.
“Lieber Gott!” he shrieked, clutching at my coat and dancing around me. “Lieber Gott! You understand German. You are no cursed Italian. God be thanked. In three weeks have I heard no German.”
Even the asses were complaining by the time he had finished shouting and settled down to tell his troubles. He was only another German on his Wanderjahr (year of wandering), who had strayed far south in the peninsula, and, after losing his last copper, was struggling northward again as rapidly as he could on strength gained from a crust of bread or a few wayside berries each day. One needed only to touch him to know that he was as thin as a side-show skeleton. I offered him half of a cheese I carried in a pocket, and he snatched it with the hungry cry of a wolf, and devoured it as we burrowed deep into the husks.
All night long the water dripped from my elbows and oozed out of my shoes, and a bitter mountain wind swept through the cracks of the building. I had just begun to sleep when morning broke. I rose with joints so stiff that I could hardly move. I pounded and rubbed them for a half hour before they were in working order. Outside a cold drizzle was falling; but, bidding farewell to my companion of the night, I set out along the mountain highway.
Two hours beyond the barn, I came upon a miserable group of huts crowded together on the top of a hill. Among them was an even more miserable inn, where I stopped for a bowl of thin soup in which had been drowned a lump of black bread. Then still hungry, I plodded on in the drizzle.
A night of corn-husks had made me look more like a beggar than I knew. Two miles beyond the village, I passed a ragged road-repairer and a boy who were breaking stone at the wayside. Near by was a hedge weighted down with blackberries, to which I hastened and fell to picking my late dinner. The workman stared a moment, open-mouthed, laid aside his sledge, and mumbled something to the boy. The boy left his place, wandered down the road a short distance beyond me, and idled about as if waiting for someone. With a half filled cap, I set off again. The boy edged nearer to me as I approached, and, brushing against me, thrust something under my arm and ran back to the stone-pile. In my astonishment I dropped the gift on the highway. It was a quarter loaf of black bread left over from the ragged workman’s dinner.
The next afternoon found me looking down upon the city of Florence, in a vast valley where the winding Arno was bluish silver under the setting sun. By evening I was housed in the city of the poet Dante and the artist Michelangelo.
During my four days in Florence I lived with the poorest working class, but spent hours each day in cathedral and galleries. Beggars were everywhere. I paid half a franc a day for a good sized room, and bought my food of a traveling restaurant. At night there appeared at street corners in the unwashed section of the city men with pushcarts laden with boiled tripe. Around them gathered jostling crowds, who continued pushing until the last morsel had been sold. Each customer seemed to possess but a single cent which he had carefully guarded through the day, waiting for the coming of the tripe man. Never did the peddler make a sale without a quarrel arising over the size of the morsel; and never did the buyer leave until a second strip about the size of a match had been added to his share to make up what he claimed to be the fair weight.