I lay many weeks, Signori, less a man than a
corpse, and when I got back again to my nets and my toil, I did not
withhold my son from the call of the Republic. He went in my place to
meet the infidel--a service from which he never came back. This was the
duty of men who had grown in experience, and who were not to be deluded
into wickedness by the evil company of the galleys. But this calling of
children into the snares of the devil grieves a father, and--I will own
the weakness, if such it be--I am not of a courage and pride to send
forth my own flesh and blood into the danger and corruption of war and
evil society, as in days when the stoutness of the heart was like the
stoutness of the limbs. Give me back, then, my boy, till he has seen my
old head laid beneath the sands, and until, by the aid of blessed St.
Anthony, and such counsels as a poor man can offer, I may give him more
steadiness in his love of the right, and until I may have so shaped his
life, that he will not be driven about by every pleasant or treacherous
wind that may happen to blow upon his bark. Signori, you are rich, and
powerful, and honored, and though you may be placed in the way of
temptations to do wrongs that are suited to your high names and
illustrious fortunes, ye know little of the trials of the poor. What are
the temptations of the blessed St. Anthony himself, to those of the evil
company of the galleys! And now, Signori, though you may be angry to
hear it, I will say, that when an aged man has no other kin on earth,
or none so near as to feel the glow of the thin blood of the poor, than
one poor boy, St.
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