remaining nine: Then, alas! what do I go on? How shall I come to a
perfumed end, who walk on ten indecent toes? Well may the delicate
gentlemen sneer at me and scorn me: As for the angelic Lady who deigns to
look so low, I may say of her that her graciousness clothes what she
looks at: To her the foot, the leg, the back: To her the very soul is
bared: But she is a rarity upon earth. Oh, Barto, Barto, she is rarest
in Milan! I might run a day's length and not find her. If, O Barto, as
my boot hints to me, I am about to be stripped of my last covering, I
must hurry to the inconvenient little chamber of my mother, who cannot
refuse to acknowledge me as of this pattern: Barto, O shoemaker! thou
son of artifice and right-hand-man of necessity, preserve me in the
fashion of the time: Cobble me neatly: A dozen wax threads and I am
remade:--Excellent! I thank you! Now I can plant my foot bravely: Oh,
Barto, my shoemaker! between ourselves, it is unpleasant in these refined
days to be likened at all to that preposterous Adam!"

The omission of the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical,
veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung
about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not
from a perception of the double edge down the length of them.

As Luigi was coming to the terminating line, the door opened. A very
handsome sullen young woman, of the dark, thick-browed Lombard type,
asked what was wanted; at the same time the deep voice of a man;
conjecturally rising from a lower floor, called, and a lock was rattled.
The woman told Luigi to enter. He sent a glance behind him; he had
evidently been drained of his sprightliness in a second; he moved in with
the slackness of limb of a gibbeted figure. The door shut; the woman led
him downstairs. He could not have danced or sung a song now for great
pay. The smell of mouldiness became so depressing to him that the smell