This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes. It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say, intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with longing;--and my mother destined me to a notary's desk, and wished me to be shut there all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all the crimes, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of gold! She wished to make me a notary's clerk! I gazed at these men who seemed to me so happy--these slender, agile, vigorous creatures in their skins that shone like the skins of green snakes, in their broidered, glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps with the white plume in each. "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished crossed the cord that marked their arena and threw his strong arms about me, and cried, "Body of Christ! you are little Pippo!" For he had been my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went with them. It was wickedly done, for my poor mother slept, knowing nothing, when in the dusk before daybreak I slipped through the bars of the casement and noiselessly dropped on to a raft in the river below, and thence joined my new friends. It was wickedly done; but I could not help it. Fate was stronger than I. The old man did not disturb himself as to whether what he had encouraged me to do was ill or well. He foresaw in me an athlete who would do him honor and make the ducats ring merrier in his purse. Besides, I had cost him nothing.