“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerning myself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I had a collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with a broken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and other small vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, and into these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spices taken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, making various colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampened and rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, and then went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or to poison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of our house. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with what suavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served--to the very death--our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were with our enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, I thought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that if my craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would take for myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken by some of them. “These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the town school and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of the crude outbreaks of my companions. “Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father in the late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing, as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and also I suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at the edge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a white mushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It is an Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger than a mustard seed would destroy your life.’