All were dishevelled, unkempt, ragged, dirty, and, doubtless, verminous.
Most were greedy and wolfish as they thrust one another aside to reach Fra
Gervasio, as if they feared that the supply of alms and food should be
exhausted ere their turn arrived. Amongst them there was commonly a small
sprinkling of mendicant friars, some of these, perhaps, just the hypocrite
rogues that I have since discovered many of them to be, though at the time
all who wore the scapulary were holy men in my innocent eyes. They were
mostly, or so they pretended, bent upon pilgrimages to distant parts,
living upon such alms as they could gather on their way.
On the steps of the chapel Fra Gervasio would stand--gaunt and impassive--
with his posse of attendant grooms behind him. One of the latter, standing
nearest to our almoner, held a great sack of broken bread; another
presented a wooden, trough-like platter filled with slices of meat, and a
third dispensed out of horn cups a poor, thin, and rather sour, but very
wholesome wine, which he drew from the skins that were his charge.
From one to the other were the beggars passed on by Fra Gervasio, and
lastly came they back to him, to receive from his hands a piece of money--a
grosso, of which he held the bag himself.
On the day of which I write, as I stood there gazing down upon that mass of
misery, marvelling perhaps a little upon the inequality of fortune, and
wondering vaguely what God could be about to inflict so much suffering upon
certain of His creatures, to cause one to be born into purple and another
into rags, my eyes were drawn by the insistent stare of two monks who stood
at the back of the crowd with their shoulders to the wall.
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