s been transplanted into Italian brains, and that now there
is such a plentiful crop of the superior quality, your native teachers
are mere propagators of degeneracy. Ecco! your curls are now of the
right proportion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will free
you from the encumbrance of this cloth. _Gnaffe_! I almost advise you
to retain the faded jerkin and hose a little longer; they give you the
air of a fallen prince."

"But the question is," said the young Greek, leaning against the high
back of a chair, and returning Nello's contemplative admiration with a
look of inquiring anxiety; "the question is, in what quarter I am to
carry my princely air, so as to rise from the said fallen condition. If
your Florentine patrons of learning share this scholarly hostility to
the Greeks, I see not how your city can be a hospitable refuge for me,
as you seemed to say just now."

"_Pian piano_--not so fast," said Nello, sticking his thumbs into his
belt and nodding to Sandro to restore order. "I will not conceal from
you that there is a prejudice against Greeks among us; and though, as a
barber unsnared by authorship, I share no prejudices, I must admit that
the Greeks are not always such pretty youngsters as yourself: their
erudition is often of an uncombed, unmannerly aspect, and encrusted with
a barbarous utterance of Italian, that makes their converse hardly more
euphonious than that of a Tedesco in a state of vinous loquacity. And
then, again, excuse me--we Florentines have liberal ideas about speech,
and consider that an instrument which can flatter and promise so
cleverly as the tongue, must have been partly made for those purposes;
and that truth is a riddle for eyes and wit to discover, which it were a
mere spoiling of sport for the tongue to betray. Still we have our
limits beyond which we call dissimulation treachery. But it is said of
the Greeks that their honesty begins at what is the hanging point with
us, and that since the old Furies went to sleep, your Christian Greek is
of so easy a conscience that he would make a stepping-stone of his
father's corpse."

The flush on the stranger's face indicated what seemed so natural a
movement of resentment, that the good-natured Nello hastened to atone
for his want of reticence.

"Be not offended, _bel giovane_; I am but repeating what I hear in my
shop; as you may perceive, my eloquence is simply the cream which I skim
off my clients' talk. Heaven forb