[31] The Cathedral of Pisa, one of the most remarkable monuments of the middle ages, owes its origin to such an expedition; for it was built with part of the rich booty taken from the Saracens at Palermo in the year 1063.
[32] This city was taken from the Genoese by the Turks in 1474, but the Christians were not all driven out. The late Father Theiner has published an interesting letter from the Papal Nuncio in Poland in 1579, in which he mentions having met some Kaffa people at Wilna and tells of their strange manner of obtaining a priest, reminding one a little of Michas and the Levite in Judges xvii.
[33] McPherson’s Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 562.
[34] Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, p. 309.
[35] Muratori, Ant. Ital., tom. ii. p. 54.
[36] The ducat was the great money of Venice, as the florin was of Florence, and bears in its name a proof of the more aristocratic government of the former city. The first gold ducats were coined by the Doge John Dandolo in 1280, and are inscribed I0. DANDVL. DVX.
A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.
Rose Standish Howson—that was her name, and very proud she was of it. Back of the Mayflower, she knew little about her ancestors; but certain it was that in that well-filled vessel one of her forefathers had come to America, and, marrying a distant connection of the veritable Standish family, had handed this name down to all succeeding generations. Rose boasted, so far as it is proper for a well-bred New England girl to boast, that, however it might have been outside of her own country, here at least her lineage was most democratically noble; she belonged—and could prove it, too, out of a little book compiled by her grandfather—thoroughly to the old Puritan race. In all her books the name was written in full—Rose Standish Howson; and it was her unfailing source of regret that her only brother had not been called Miles. John Howson laughed good-naturedly at his sister’s foible, but was really quite as proud as she, though in a more passive way.
Their home was not in Boston. Let this important fact receive our