I could not afford to baulk the popular will, and I was proud to show them all I could do--I, Pipistrello, whom they had cuffed and kicked so often in the old time for climbing their walnut trees and their pear trees, their house-roofs and their church-towers. So, when the day cooled I drew a circle with a red rope round myself and my men on a piece of waste ground outside the town, and all Orte flocked out there as the sun went down, shouting and cheering for me as though Pipistrello were a king or a hero. The populace is always thus--the giddiest-pated fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison--the same people that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte. To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears. It was a rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it soon passes. I had drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight. In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil. At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me, always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his head little Febo.