there I abode for three whole years. But my ill luck still followed me,
for my father once more caused me to go about with him as his _famulus_,
and would never allow me on any pretext to escape this task. I should
hesitate to say that he did this through cruelty; for, taking into
consideration what ensued, you may perchance be brought to see that this
action of his came to pass rather through the will of Heaven than through
any failing of his own. I must add too that my mother and my aunt were
fully in agreement with him in his treatment of me. In after times,
however, he dealt with me in much milder fashion, for he took to live with
him two of his nephews, wherefore my own labour was lessened by the amount
of service he exacted from these. Either I did not go out at all, or if we
all went out together the task was less irksome.

"When I had completed my sixteenth year--up to which time I served my
father constantly--we once more changed our house, and dwelt with
Alessandro Cardano next door to the bakery of the Bossi. My father had two
other nephews, sons of a sister of his, one named Evangelista, a member of
the Franciscan Order, and nearly seventy years of age, and the other Otto
Cantone, a farmer of the taxes, and very rich. The last-named, before he
died, wished to leave me his sole heir; but this my father forbad, saying
that Otto's wealth had been ill gotten; wherefore the estate was
distributed according to the directions of the surviving brother."[17]

This, told as nearly as may be in his own words, is the story of Cardan's
birth and childhood and early discipline, a discipline ill calculated to
let him grow up to useful and worthy manhood. It must have been a wretched
spring of life. Many times he refers to the hard slavery he underwent in
the days when he was forced to carry his father's bag about the town, and
tells how he had to listen to words of insult cast at his mother's
name.[18] Like most boys who lead solitary lives, unrelieved by the
companionship of other children, he was driven in upon himself, and grew
up into a fanciful imaginative youth, a lover of books rather than of
games, with an old head upon his young shoulders. After such a training it
was only natural that he should be transformed from a nervous hysterical
child into an embittered, cross-grained man, profligate and superstitious
at the same time. Abundant light is thrown upon every stage of his career,
for few men have left a clearer