ith the Neri, who possessed a
considerable range of houses on the side towards the hill.

In one of these Neri houses there lived, however, a descendant of the
Bardi, and of that very branch which a century and a half before had
become Counts of Vernio: a descendant who had inherited the old family
pride and energy, the old love of pre-eminence, the old desire to leave
a lasting track of his footsteps on the fast-whirling earth. But the
family passions lived on in him under altered conditions: this
descendant of the Bardi was not a man swift in street warfare, or one
who loved to play the signor, fortifying strongholds and asserting the
right to hang vassals, or a merchant and usurer of keen daring, who
delighted in the generalship of wide commercial schemes: he was a man
with a deep-veined hand cramped by much copying of manuscripts, who ate
sparing dinners, and wore threadbare clothes, at first from choice and
at last from necessity; who sat among his books and his marble fragments
of the past, and saw them only by the light of those far-off younger
days which still shone in his memory: he was a moneyless, blind old
scholar--the Bardo de' Bardi to whom Nello, the barber, had promised to
introduce the young Greek, Tito Melema.

The house in which Bardo lived was situated on the side of the street
nearest the hill, and was one of those large sombre masses of stone
building pierced by comparatively small windows, and surmounted by what
may be called a roofed terrace or loggia, of which there are many
examples still to be seen in the venerable city. Grim doors, with
conspicuous scrolled hinges, having high up on each side of them a small
window defended by iron bars, opened on a groined entrance-court, empty
of everything but a massive lamp-iron suspended from the centre of the
groin. A smaller grim door on the left-hand admitted to the stone
staircase, and the rooms on the ground-floor. These last were used as a
warehouse by the proprietor; so was the first floor; and both were
filled with precious stores, destined to be carried, some perhaps to the
banks of the Scheldt, some to the shores of Africa, some to the isles of
the Aegean, or to the banks of the Euxine. Maso, the old serving-man,
when he returned from the Mercato with the stock of cheap vegetables,
had to make his slow way up to the second storey before he reached the
door of his master, Bardo, through which we are about to enter only a
few mornings after