For two maid slaves, from Tanais, slave-born, of fourteen and fifteen, answering to the names of Lucilla and Yulia, sound, healthy, never having been tortured or branded, each having black hair, black eyes, and twenty-eight teeth, trained to wait on a lady, and speaking intelligible Greek, besides a barbarous dialect of their own, warranted docile, and not given to stealing; at 20 ducats each Ducats 40 ---------- In all Ducats 440 ========== RUSTAN KARABOGHAZJI, the son of Daddirján, _Merchant_. (_Witness_)--SEBASTIAN OMOBONO, of Venice, _Clerk_. Omobono observed that the receipt acknowledged forty ducats as the price of the two girls, instead of twenty-four. 'Rustan Karaboghazji, surnamed the Truth-speaker, does not sell slaves at twelve ducats,' answered the Bokharian with dignity. 'Moreover, your employer will see that he has paid forty, and you can justly keep the sixteen ducats for yourself.' 'That would not be honest,' protested Omobono, shaking his neat grey beard. Rustan smiled, in a pitying way. 'You Venetians do not really understand business,' he said, tightening the strings of the canvas bag into which he had swept the gold, and knotting them as he rose. A few minutes later Omobono was trudging along after the two palanquins, wondering much at certain things that had happened to him during the last twenty-four hours and less. For he was curious, as you know, and it irritated him to feel that something was going on in the world, all about him and near him, of which he could not even guess the nature, manifesting itself in such nonsensical phrases as 'four toes and five toes,' and 'over the water,' which nevertheless produced such truly astonishing results. Since the previous afternoon he had met four persons who knew those absurd words,--the negress, her Bokharian husband, the sacristan to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and a Greek slave-girl, whom he was far from recognising as the beautiful creature he had seen yesterday in the ruined house in the beggars' quarter. She was so closely veiled to-day that he could not in the least guess what her face was like. Since she not only knew the first password, but had whispered the second to him, he wondered why she had not used her knowledge to get her freedom. It was incredible that the people who knew the words should not be banded together in some secret brotherhood; but if they were brethren, how could they sell one another into slavery? Omobono was so much interested in these problems that he did not see where he was till the leading palanquin entered Zeno's gate.