emperors, and dine every day off plate of gold, and with a dozen
courses--is still nobody. Therefore regulate your expenditure
accordingly, all ye who would be somebody. We go with M. Dumas to the
opera, not, as we have said, for the music or the dancing, but because,
as is the way with dramatic authors, he will there introduce us, for the
sake of contrast with an institution very different from that of an
operatic company--

"Sometimes in the midst of a cavatina or a _pas-de-deux_, a
bell with a sharp, shrill, excoriating sound, will be heard; it
is the bell _della misericordia_. Listen: if it sound but once,
it is for some ordinary accident; if twice, for one of a
serious nature; if it sounds three times, it is a case of
death. If you look around, you will see a slight stir in some
of the boxes, and it will often happen that the person you have
been speaking to, if a Florentine, will excuse himself for
leaving you, will quietly take his hat and depart. You inquire
what that bell means, and why it produces so strange an effect.
You are told it is the bell _della misericordia_, and that he
with whom you were speaking is a brother of the order.

"This brotherhood of mercy is one of the noblest institutions
in the world. It was founded in 1244, on occasion of the
frequent pestilences which at that period desolated the town,
and it has been perpetuated to the present day, without any
alteration, except in its details--with none in its purely
charitable spirit. It is composed of seventy-two brothers,
called chiefs of the watch, who are each in service four months
in the year. Of these seventy-two brothers, thirty are priests,
fourteen gentlemen, and twenty-eight artists. To these, who