From Bosnia and Servia and Hungary; from Negropont and the islands of the Greek Archipelago; from new Rome itself, whose desolated houses and markets weeping Amastris had been emptied to repeople; from Trebizond and the Crimea, it came endlessly floating, this waste drift of palaces and temples and antique civilisations, which had been wrecked and scattered by that ruthless hate. Ruined merchants and traders; unfrocked satraps; priests of outlandish garb; girl derelicts blooded and defiled by janissaries; childless mothers and motherless children—scared immigrants all, they wailed and wandered in the towns, denouncing in their despair the creed whose jealousies and corruptions had delivered them to this pass. In the first of their coming, a certain indignant sympathy had helped to the practical amelioration of their bitter lot. Men scowled and muttered over the histories of their wrongs; took warning for a possible overthrow of the entire Christian Church; talked big of sinking all differences in a kingdom-wide crusade; and, finally, fell to fisticuffs upon the question of a common commander for this problematic host. After which the immigrants, always flocking in thicker, and making civil difficulties, fell gradually subject to an indifference, not to say intolerance, which was at least half as great as that from which they had fled. Fashion, moreover, began to find in the Ser Mahomet a figure more and more attractive, in proportion as he approached it, issuing from the mists of the Orient. It was ravished with, if it did not want to be ravished by, those adorable Spahis, with their tinkling jackets and sashes and melancholy, wicked faces. It adapted prettily to itself the caftan, and the curdee, and the turban; re-read Messer Boccaccio’s most Eastern fables; acted them, too, in drawers of rose-coloured damask, and little talpoes, which were tiny jewelled caps of velvet, cocked, and falling over one ear in a tassel. But by that time the cult of immigrancy was discredited _du haut en das_. Many of the unhappy wretches were drawn by natural process into such sinks as ’The Vineyard.’ The poor are good to the poor, and pitiful—which is strange—towards any fall from prosperity. In the instance of this old woman, it was notable how she was humoured of the drifting populace. The very ladroni, who, outside their own rookery, might have tormented and soused her in the kennel, were content here to rally and banter her a little, showing their white teeth to one another in jokes whose bent she was none the worse for misapprehending. For she had not much Italian, it appeared; though what was hers she was turning to the best possible advantage in the matter of fortune-telling.