such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing
but fear of the Baron himself, of his sons, when they were grown up,
and of his poorer kinsmen who lived with him. There were no crimes which
such malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a
word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the
first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen,
brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually
educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's
estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally
married to respectable retainers. The position of twenty or thirty women
and girls under the same roof with several hundreds of the most
atrocious cutthroats of any age was undeniably such as to justify the
most tyrannical measures for their protection.

There are traces, even now, of the enforced privacy in which they lived.
For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window
that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses
something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby
the men and women occupy different parts of the house.

One must try to call up the pictures of one day, to get any idea of
those times; one must try and see the grey dawn stealing down the dark,
unwindowed lower walls of the fortress that flanks the Church of the
Holy Apostles,--the narrow and murky street below, the broad, dim space
beyond, the mystery of the winding distances whence comes the first
sound of the day, the far, high cry of the waterman driving his little
donkey with its heavy load of water-casks. The beast stumbles along in
the foul gloom, through the muddy ruts, over heaps of garbage at the
corners, picking its way as best it can, till it starts with a snort and
almost falls with its knees upon a dead man, whose thrice-stabbed body
lies right across the way. The waterman, ragged, sandal-shod, stops,
crosses himself, and drags his beast back hurriedly with a muttered
exclamation of mingled horror, disgust and fear for himself, and makes
for the nearest corner, stumbling along in his haste lest he should be
found with the corpse and taken for the murderer. As the dawn
forelightens, and the cries go up from the city, the black-hooded
Brothers of Prayer and Death come in a little troop, their lantern still
burning as they carry their empty stretcher, seeking for dead