Although I am of a reasonably robust organization, as you see, my father, on comparing me with my brothers, deemed me so frail and sickly that he would not teach me either to cast the net or to sail a boat. He simply showed me how to handle the oar with both hands, to row a small boat, and sent me to Venice to earn my living as an assistant gondolier for hire. It was a great sorrow and humiliation to me, thus to go into bondage, to leave my father's house, the seashore and the honorable and perilous trade of my ancestors. But I had a fine voice, I knew a goodly number of fragments of Ariosto and Tasso. I had in me the making of an excellent gondolier, and with time and patience, I might earn fifty francs a month in the service of artists and strangers. You do not know, Zorzi--at this point Lelio broke off his narrative and turned to me--you have no idea how rapidly the taste and appreciation of music and poetry develop among us common people. We had then and we still have--although the custom threatens to die out--our troubadours and poets, whom we call _cupids_; itinerant rhapsodists they are, and they bring us from the central provinces inaccurate notions of the mother-tongue, modified, I might more properly say enriched, by all the genius of the dialects of the north and south. Men of the people, like ourselves, endowed at once with memory and imaginative power, do not hesitate at all to blend their curious improvisations with the creations of the poets. Forever picking up and dropping as they pass some novel turn of phrase, they embellish their speech and the text of their authors with a most extraordinary confusion of idioms. We might say that they preserve the instability of the language in the frontier provinces and along the coast. In our ignorance we accept as decisive the decisions of this itinerant academy; and you have often had occasion to admire, sometimes the energy, sometimes the grotesqueness of the Italian of our ports as rendered by the singers of the lagoons.