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There is a plaza, or central square, and a great cathedral. The streets are narrow and dirty, and in the quarters where the poorer class live, babies and pigs roll together in the gutters, and boys and girls without a rag of clothing on them hold out their hands for alms.
Often they find in the sand fragments of gold or silver jewels, carried into the Seine either by the gutters or from the masses of snow and ice collected in the streets in winter and thrown into the river. We do not know by virtue of what tradition, or by what usage, these industrious people, generally honest, peaceable, and laborious, are so formidably named.
There was much talk about the matter around the town. People who walked downtown early that morning peered into gutters and down through sidewalk gratings. Then, at about seven o'clock a sensation started, and swiftly grew.
Nikky, who in all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of tiles and gutters, vastly large, looked rather astounded. "The roof!" he said, surveying the note. And fell to thinking, such a mixture of rapture and despair as only twenty-three, and hopeless, can know.
The old women of the slums the forlorn, aloof figures of shattered health and looks creeping along the gutters, dancing in the barrel houses, sleeping on the floor in some vile hole in the wall sleeping the sleep from which one awakes bitten by mice and bugs, and swarming with lice. She had entire confidence in Brent's judgment.
For instance, the German student may get drunk and fall asleep in the gutter with no other penalty than that of having the next morning to tip the policeman who has found him and brought him home. But for this purpose he must choose the gutters of side-streets.
It's put down to the wickedness of human nature that the parson has not got hold of the people. The parsons have lost them by senseless Conservatism, because they look to the Tories for the support of their Church, and let the religion run down the gutters. And how many thousands have you at work in the pulpit every Sunday? I'm told the Dissenting ministers have some vitality.
The accepted remedy for such a state of the case was to kill the youth at once. Amilcare did not do that, and at first was able to bless himself for his second forbearance. Grifone was privy to all his master's hopes and safeguards; Grifone wrought upon the Signoria, cajoled the clergy, bamboozled the popolani, descended even to the ragamuffins in the gutters, and taught them how to shout "Duca!
They were a proud and energetic stock, these Bardi; conspicuous among those who clutched the sword in the earliest world-famous quarrels of Florentines with Florentines, when the narrow streets were darkened with the high towers of the nobles, and when the old tutelar god Mars, as he saw the gutters reddened with neighbours' blood, might well have smiled at the centuries of lip-service paid to his rival, the Baptist.
I found, too, that unless one earns bread-and-butter, one has to sprint very fast to the workhouse door to prevent oneself starving before one gets there; so I dropped Bohemia and I dropped many other pleasant fictions as well. I took to examining pavements, saw how hard they were, had a look at the gutters, and saw how broad they were.
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