"Brother," replied Belviso, "I am sure of it, and I promise you I have
never looked forward to happiness before. This well in which I have
washed myself is lustral water. I have fouled it with the vile thing I
was once. In return it has made a new creature of me, thanks to God and
you."

"Bravo," said I, "and now, Avanti!"

"Pronti," says Belviso, and we struck east along a fine grassy valley
where the trees were in the full glory of early summer. I was full of
hope, which I could neither explain nor justify, and though I did not
know it then I had some grounds to be so. I shall not inflict upon the
reader the vicissitudes of our wearisome journey of three weeks over the
sharp-ridged valleys of lower Tuscany. We sometimes begged, sometimes
worked for the bread we ate and the sheds in which we slept. We were
tanned to the colour of walnuts, healthy as young cattle, merry as larks
in the sky. We gave each other our full confidence, or so I believed. At
any rate I kept nothing from my friend. He was more reticent. "The past
is past," he used to say. "My safety is only in the future; let me talk
to you of that." And so he did. A friendship was sealed between us which
no difference of race, degree or age could ever break in upon; we loved
each other tenderly, we were as brothers. Belviso was at one and the
same time the most affectionate, the shrewdest, and the most candid boy
that ever was conceived in sin and nurtured in vice. No shameful dealing
had left a mark upon him, he was fine gold throughout. But so I have
found it always in this dear country of my adoption, that it takes
prosperity, never misery, to corrupt its native simplicity. The lower
you descend in the scale of human attainment the greater the hopes you
may conceive of what humanity may be permitted to attain. The poor drab,
the world's hire for the price of a rush-light, the lurking thief, the