The last of the four who habitually sat with us was Giojoso, the seneschal,
a lantern-jawed fellow with black, beetling brows, about whom the only
joyous thing was his misnomer of a name.

Of the table that we kept, beyond noting that the fare was ever of a lenten
kind and that the wine was watered, I will but mention that my mother did
not observe the barrier of the salt. There was no sitting above it or
below at our board, as, from time immemorial, is the universal custom in
feudal homes. That her having abolished it was an act of humility on her
part there can be little doubt, although this was a subject upon which she
never expressed herself in my hearing.

The walls of that room were whitewashed and bare.

The floor was of stone overlain by a carpet of rushes that was changed no
oftener than once a week.

From what I have told you, you may picture something of the chill gloom of
the place, something of the pietism which hung upon the very air of that
apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had, too,
an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which is never
absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a smell
difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like no other
smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty odour, an
odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh air of heaven
might relieve but could not dissipate; and to this is wed, but so subtly
that it would be impossible to say which is predominant, the slight, sickly
aroma of wax.

We supped there that night in silence at about the hour that poor Gino