I cannot say that I was discontented; indeed, I
have always found that the harder my labour is and the straiter my lot,
the less room I have for discontent. With this peasant, his family, his
pigs, hens and goats, Belviso and I lived, in a hovel which, had it not
been roofed over, might have been a cote or a pigsty. The man's name was
Masuccio, his wife's Gioconda; between them they had a brood of nine
children--a grown daughter of fourteen, three stout lads, four brats,
and a child not breeched; and in addition to all these, and to Belviso
and myself, to a sow in farrow, four goats, and hens innumerable, the
good man's father was posed as veritable master of the whole--an old man
afflicted with palsy, who did nothing but shake and suck at his pipe,
but who, nevertheless, had, by virtue of his years and situation, the
only semblance of a bed, the first of everything, and the best and the
most of that. The rest of us, higgledy-piggledy, lay by night on the
mud-floor, with a little pease-straw for litter, and scrambled all
together for the remnants of the old tyrant's food. Yet nobody
questioned his absolute right, and nobody seemed unhappy, nor looked out
at any prospect but unremitting, barely remunerative labour from year's
end to year's end. This is, I am now convinced, the true philosophy of
life--that labour is a man's only riches, and food, shelter, rest, and
the satisfaction of appetite his means whereby to grow rich.
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