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If he were proud of belonging to the Nicolotti, that most powerful faction of the populace, he knew that they were regarded by the government as the aristocrats of the people. Marina arranged the child's covering in silence, and stooped her face wistfully to touch his cheek, but she did not turn her head to look at the man behind her. "L'amor zè fato per chi lo sa fare,"
The other faction, called Nicolotti, are distinguished by a black assisa. The quarters of the town are divided unequally and irregularly into these two parties. What was once a formidable rivalry between two sections of the Venetian populace, still survives in challenges to trials of strength and skill upon the water.
But when the doors had at last been thrown wide to the sunshine and the babel of life which rose from the eager, thronging populace who had no right of entrance on this solemn occasion men who had no vote, women and children who had all their lives been Nicolotti of the Nicolotti a Venetian must indeed have been stolid to feel no thrill of pride as the procession, with great pomp, passed out of the church to a chorus of bells and cannon and shouts of the people, proclaiming him their chosen chief.
"If it be true," she said, "the end of pain is reached, and he hath won his happiness. Why cometh not my Marco?" A gondola of the Nicolotti detached itself from a group of serenaders just above the palace, was caught for a few moments among the pali before the Ca' Giustiniani, and then floated leisurely down toward the Piazzetta.
It was in this canal that the victims of the Inquisition mysteriously disappeared, and Marina had repressed a shudder while she answered, "Thou wilt come to me, Piero, if the purse of the Nicolotti weighs little; thou shalt not fail, for this, of wearing the honor of gastaldo grande.
"Messer Magagnati," he began awkwardly, twirling his black cap in his hand rather after the fashion of a gondolier than of the Chief of the Nicolotti, "I must crave, by dawn of the morrow, the blessing of San Nicolò of holy memory."
Thou hast no right to mind what chances to me yet thou hast made me give up the old life." "Because I knew thou couldst do better. See where thou standest to-day! It is not a little thing to be a governor of the Nicolotti!" "It is a truth," Piero confessed, "upside down, and not to boast of, for whoever tries it would wish it less.
Those who dwelt on the western or land side of this boundary were styled the Nicolotti, after the parish of San Nicolo; while those on the eastern or sea side took the appellation of Castellani, from the district of Castello.
She noted it idly while she sat waiting for Marco, for in the gondola there was a graceful figure, closely wrapped, clasping her mantle yet more closely with a hand that was white and slender enough for one of the nobility; yet the gondolier wore the black sash of the Nicolotti with the great hat of a bravo shading his face.
Should not the Nicolotti blessed be the Madonna! always overcome the Castellani with Piero at their head, in those party battles on the bridges which had now grown to be as serious a factor in the lives of the gondoliers of Venice as they were disturbing to the citizens at large, and therefore the more to the glory of the combatants?
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