, so faithful to mankind,
being driven forth of their own houses, went straying at their
pleasure about the fields, where the very corn was abandoned, without
being cut, much less gathered in; and many, well nigh like reasonable
creatures, after grazing all day, returned at night, glutted, to their
houses, without the constraint of any herdsman.

[Footnote 13: _i.e._ walled burghs.]

[Footnote 14: _i.e._ in miniature.]

To leave the country and return to the city, what more can be said
save that such and so great was the cruelty of heaven (and in part,
peradventure, that of men) that, between March and the following July,
what with the virulence of that pestiferous sickness and the number of
sick folk ill tended or forsaken in their need, through the
fearfulness of those who were whole, it is believed for certain that
upward of an hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls
of the city of Florence, which, peradventure, before the advent of
that death-dealing calamity, had not been accounted to hold so many?
Alas, how many great palaces, how many goodly houses, how many noble
mansions, once full of families, of lords and of ladies, abode empty
even to the meanest servant! How many memorable families, how many
ample heritages, how many famous fortunes were seen to remain without
lawful heir! How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, how many
sprightly youths, whom, not others only, but Galen, Hippocrates or
AEsculapius themselves would have judged most hale, breakfasted in the
morning with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends and that same night
supped with their ancestors in the other world!

I am myself weary of going wandering so long among such miseries;
wherefore, purposing henceforth to leave such part thereof as I can
fitly, I say that,--our city being at this pass, well nigh void of
inhabitants,--it chanced (as I afterward heard from a person worthy of
credit) that there foregathered in the venerable church of Santa Maria
Novella, one Tuesday morning when there was well nigh none else there,
seven young ladies, all knit one to another by friendship or
neighbourhood or kinship, who had heard divine service in mourning
attire, as sorted with such a season. Not one of them had passed her
eight-and-twentieth year nor was less than eighteen years old, and
each was discreet and of noble blood, fair of favour and well-mannered
and full of honest sprightliness. The names of these ladies I would in
prope