lets,
and their good dames hard at work at their spindles. O happy they! They
were sure of burial in their native earth, and none were left desolate
by husbands that loved France better than Italy. One kept awake to tend
her child in its cradle, lulling it with the household words that had
fondled her own infancy. Another, as she sat in the midst of her family,
drawing the flax from the distaff, told them stories of Troy, and
Fiesole, and Rome. It would have been as great a wonder, then, to see
such a woman as Cianghella, or such a man as Lapo Salterello, as it
would now be to meet with a Cincinnatus or a Cornelia.[16]

"It was at that peaceful, at that beautiful time," continued the poet's
ancestor, "when we all lived in such good faith and fellowship, and in
so sweet a place, that the blessed Virgin vouchsafed the first sight
of me to the cries of my mother; and there, in your old Baptistery, I
became, at once, Christian and Cacciaguida. My brothers were called
Moronto and Eliseo. It was my wife that brought thee, from Valdipado,
thy family name of Alighieri. I then followed the Emperor Conrad, and
he made me a knight for my good service, and I went with him to fight
against the wicked Saracen law, whose people usurp the fold that remains
lost through the fault of the shepherd. There, by that foul crew, was I
delivered from the snares and pollutions of the world; and so, from the
martyrdom, came to this peace."

Cacciaguida was silent. But his descendant praying to be told more of
his family and of the old state of Florence, the beatified soldier
resumed. He would not, however, speak of his own predecessors. He said
it would be more becoming to say nothing as to who they were, or the
place they came from. All he disclosed was, that his father and
mother lived near the gate San Piero.[17] With regard to Florence, he
continued, the number of the inhabitants fit to carry arms was at that
time not a fifth of its present amount; but then the blood of the
whole city was pure. It had not been mixed up with that of Campi, and
Certaldo, and Figghine. It ran clear in the veins of the humblest
mechanic.

"Oh, how much better would it have been," cried the soul of the old
Florentine, "had my countrymen still kept it as it was, and not brought
upon themselves the stench of the peasant knave out of Aguglione, and
that other from Signa, with his eye to a bribe! Had Rome done its duty
to the emperor, and so prevented the factions