Adventure Magazine Cover — page 147: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

virtue with the townspeople. Since I was loath at the time to accept a place in his guard, the duke gave me a bag of gold (which I in turn gave to the girl), and sneering at my preference for the mercery, dismissed me, saying the place would be open if I should make a choice anew. He gave me, too, a par- don for old Porsini, whom in truth he had found out, on condition that the mercer take me back and treat me fairly. | But Porsini turned me from his door before I had opportunity to reveal to him the paper I carried. Thereupon, seeing me thus turned out, Ercole, an- other apprentice, stole forth and presented me with a little money he had saved up, for (simple-hearted wretch!) he was under the impression I aspired to the hand of the mercer’s daughter, and now, at my departure, I should leave him free to press his own suit. I took the money, giving him in return the duke’s paper, to hold over the head of old Porsini as a club, thus insuring better treatment at his hands. With the money I went on a three-days’ drinking bout, ending up in a street-gutter, where Stella, the girl I had married so suddenly at the duke’s behest, found me and brought me to her home. In a very short time [ had become part and parcel of the Olivieri household, even to the wearing of one of Papa Olivieri’s suits in place of my own garments which I had ruined during my drinking bout. It then transpired that, having been promised their trade by a great many of the townspeople, Stella and I opened up a mercery with the gold the duke had given me, and for the nonce, did very well withal. Then Stella, getting into her head false notions as to position and prestige in the community, began to hint that she was too good to work in the shop, that it ill befitted the wife of a prosperous young mercer to wear the clothes she did, and other such nonsense, goaded on and abetted in it by her shrewish mother and an old virgin virago of an aunt. Stella even Le inners Td - +, 5 \ G - “s suggested that I cut off an inch or two off the yard- stick and thus realize a little more profit on our sales, saying, poor wretch, that all the other mercers did that very thing; why not we? Soon afterward I was summoned to Rome to attend my father who was dying; he died with my brother’s name on his lips, my brother who had run away from home to seek adventure on far seas. For me it was evident that he had nothing but scorn. And thus he died, and with the proceeds that I forced from one of his debtors, I laid him away. Traveling back to Rometia, I fell in with the pink- bearded sergeant and a troop of horse. They had been waiting on His Holiness the Pope for some message to their master, the duke. We talked of many things, and the more I weighed my own hapless condition with that of these care-free swash- bucklers, the more I envied them. When I got home, I found things had gone from bad to worse. Trade had fallen off to almost nothing; our creditors were threatening for their money. And then I saw that Stella had stooped to the littleness of breaking three or four inches from the yardstick. That, what with my disgust with things in general, was the last straw. I made to rush forth into the night without hat or cloak, and Stella cried out pite- ously— “Oh Francesco, where art thou going?” ‘‘Where I should have gone in the beginning!” I shouted—‘“‘to join the duke’s guard. MY FIRST assignment in the duke’s service was not entirely to my taste, and you shall judge why. There was a certain wealthy count that the duke wished to marry to his sister, the Countess Anita (her former marriage being since annulled). Now this nobleman was enamored of a famous courtezan. It fell to me to convince her that it were December 8, 1926 I4I COnuiclboooks.c©