I had
drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could
do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave
people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and
fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we
ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in
ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of
red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before
kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that
which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long
set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight.

In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I
had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on
the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and
blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded
them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.

At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me,
always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's
trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and
sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his
head little Febo.

The mite whom we called Phoebus, because we had found him at sunrise
and he had such yellow locks--yellow as the dandelion or the
buttercup--was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia--a
soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to
whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play
ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was
such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old
then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it
had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so,
I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect
sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head
our tiny Phoebus--all at once as I did this, which I had done a
hundred times, and had always done in safety--all at once, amongst the
sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's
eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand.
She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowe