knows how cockroaches, or kitchen-beetles, swarm in bakeries, inns and
corn-mills. These are a sort of crawling, stinking insects, with long,
ungainly, shaggy legs and an ugly shell of a dirty yellow.[1]

During the Civil Wars that stained the Arbia red and fertilized the
olive-yards with the blood of nobles, these loathsome insects had two
names in Tuscany: the Florentines called them Siennese, and the Siennese
Florentines.[2]

[Footnote 1: It would be better to speak of the wing-cases. "Shell" is
an utterly unsuitable word--not in the least fitting. The Oriental
cockroach is in question, an insect familiar in almost every part of
Europe.]

[Footnote 2: In Russia they are termed Prussians, and in Prussia
Russians. The French call them _cafards_ (canting creatures,
hypocrites).]

The good Buffalmacco laughed to see the creatures all moving up and
down and in and out, looking for all the world like tiny shields of a
host of pigmy knights jousting in a fairy tourney.

"Ah, ah!" he cried to himself, "they are may-bugs bedevilled, that's
what they are! They would not enjoy the springtime, and Jupiter punished
them for their sluggishness. He has condemned them to crawl about in the
dark, weighed down by their useless wings--an object-lesson to men to
make the most of life in the heyday of youth and love."

This was what Buffalmacco said to himself; for he was ready enough, like
other folk, to see in nature a symbol of his own passions and