CHAPTER XXXVIII

AN UNEXPECTED MESSENGER LIFTS ME UP

Destitute as we were of anything but the sinews of our backs and arms, we were forced, if we would live, to work our way to Arezzo; and it often fell out that the piece-work we engaged to do kept us long in one place.  Near Sinalunga, in particular, in a green pastoral country, we hired ourselves out to a peasant to hoe his vines, and were busy there for nearly three weeks.  I cannot say that I was discontented; indeed, I have always found that the harder my labour is and the straiter my lot, the less room I have for discontent.  With this peasant, his family, his pigs, hens and goats, Belviso and I lived, in a hovel which, had it not been roofed over, might have been a cote or a pigsty.  The man’s name was Masuccio, his wife’s Gioconda; between them they had a brood of nine children—­a grown daughter of fourteen, three stout lads, four brats, and a child not breeched; and in addition to all these, and to Belviso and myself, to a sow in farrow, four goats, and hens innumerable, the good man’s father was posed as veritable master of the whole—­an old man afflicted with palsy, who did nothing but shake and suck at his pipe, but who, nevertheless, had, by virtue of his years and situation, the only semblance of a bed, the first of everything, and the best and the most of that.  The rest of us, higgledy-piggledy, lay by night on the mud-floor, with a little pease-straw for litter, and scrambled all together for the remnants of the old tyrant’s food.  Yet nobody questioned his absolute right, and nobody seemed unhappy, nor looked out at any prospect but unremitting, barely remunerative labour from year’s end to year’s end.  This is, I am now convinced, the true philosophy of life—­that labour is a man’s only riches, and food, shelter, rest, and the satisfaction of appetite his means whereby to grow rich.  In other walks of life the practice is reversed, and labour is looked upon as the means, appetite and comfort as the end.  Inconceivable folly! since labour alone brings health, and health content.  But I must relate how I was cozened out of my own healthy contentment.

One day, when I was afield in the vines not far from the high road which ran from Sinalunga to still distant Arezzo, as I was resting on my hoe in the furrow, I saw a man come by walking a pretty good horse.  He was an elderly, bearded man, very portly, and wore the brown garb of the Capuchins, which I certainly had no reason to love.  His bald head, gleaming in the sun, was of the steep and flat-topped shape of our English quartern-loaves; and it came upon me with a shock that here was that Fra Palamone, whom I had last seen extended, shot by my hand, in the Piazza Santa Maria at Florence.  This alarming discovery was verified by his nearer approach.  I recognised his twinkling, tireless eyes, his one long tooth, like a tusk, and even the scar on his right brow.  It was Fra Palamone in the flesh—­and in great and prosperous flesh.