ore.
Nor therefore were the dead honoured with aught of tears or candles or
funeral train; nay, the thing was come to such a pass that folk recked
no more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats; whereby it
very manifestly appeared that that which the natural course of things
had not availed, by dint of small and infrequent harms, to teach the
wise to endure with patience, the very greatness of their ills had
brought even the simple to expect and make no account of. The
consecrated ground sufficing not to the burial of the vast multitude
of corpses aforesaid, which daily and well nigh hourly came carried in
crowds to every church,--especially if it were sought to give each his
own place, according to ancient usance,--there were made throughout
the churchyards, after every other part was full, vast trenches,
wherein those who came after were laid by the hundred and being heaped
up therein by layers, as goods are stowed aboard ship, were covered
with a little earth, till such time as they reached the top of the
trench.

[Footnote 11: _i.e._ expectation of gain from acting as tenders of the
sick, gravediggers, etc. The word _speranza_ is, however, constantly
used by Dante and his follower Boccaccio in the contrary sense of
"fear," and may be so meant in the present instance.]

[Footnote 12: _i.e._ the cross.]

Moreover,--not to go longer searching out and recalling every
particular of our past miseries, as they befell throughout the
city,--I say that, whilst so sinister a time prevailed in the latter,
on no wise therefor was the surrounding country spared, wherein,
(letting be the castles,[13] which in their littleness[14] were like
unto the city,) throughout the scattered villages and in the fields,
the poor and miserable husbandmen and their families, without succour
of physician or aid of servitor, died, not like men, but well nigh
like beasts, by the ways or in their tillages or about the houses,
indifferently by day and night. By reason whereof, growing lax like
the townsfolk in their manners and customs, they recked not of any
thing or business of theirs; nay, all, as if they looked for death
that very day, studied with all their wit, not to help to maturity the
future produce of their cattle and their fields and the fruits of
their own past toils, but to consume those which were ready to hand.
Thus it came to pass that the oxen, the asses, the sheep, the goats,
the swine, the fowls, nay, the very dogs