The girl caught him up. “Indeed you do my uncle wrong. He meant but this: we live humbly, will you not come and rest for a moment until you may join your people?” “I ask pardon,” the boy said quickly. Whereat the man laughed, for their speech and expression had been over-serious for children, though it still was an age when children grew to be men and women often over a single night. In some provinces girls of fourteen or fifteen were considered grown women and even given in marriage. Boys at that age had seen much of the rough side of life, of war and battle and cruelty. “I will go with you,” Joseph added, kissing the cuff of the gown of the man in black as he had always been taught to do in his home. They turned to the left past the Church of the Franciscans, to the right through a short lane, and then to the left again into the most curious street of the world of that day. It was the Street of the Pigeons, famed throughout all Europe as the dwelling place of scholars, astrologers, magicians, students, and likewise doctors, brothers of the Church, and masters of the seven arts. In the worst end of the street, the upper end near the city wall, clustered the squalid dwelling places that were once the homes of Jewish refugees, fleeing from persecution in all parts of the world. Terrible poverty had existed there, and when the Jewish inhabitants finally moved to their own city, Kazimierz, across the river, the buildings which they left were scarcely fit for human beings to live in. They were, in the first place, very old and out of repair—they were built for the most part of wood, though the fronts on the street were sometimes of brick covered with rough cement or mortar. The upper stories usually overhung, and the roofs were covered with loose boards nailed in place, serving instead of tiles or shingles. Rickety staircases on the outsides of these buildings led from the street or from interior courts up to the dwelling places on the third and fourth floors, where, at the time of this story, lived family literally heaped upon family in terrible disorder and poverty. Thieves and murderers crouched there in hiding during the day, bands of lawless men had their haunts there in cellar or attic or other den. A fire in the year 1407 had swept through this street and through St. Ann’s, clearing out many of these undesirable places, but unfortunately not destroying all of them. In the lower end of the street on the side toward the University of Krakow there was more respectability since students and masters of the university inhabited there. A large students’ _bursar_ or dormitory stood near the corner where Jagiellonska now meets the Street of the Pigeons. In this lived many students; others put up near by in groups or with private families, since it was not until late in the 1490’s that the authorities compelled the students to live in university buildings.