His heart was in these inventions of his, which had as yet so
grudgingly repaid his affection. For their sake he had stinted himself
of many needful things. The meagre stipend which he received from the
patrimony of his church, eked out with the money paid him for baptisms,
funerals, and marriages, and for masses by people who had friends to be
prayed out of purgatory, would at best have barely sufficed to support
him; but he denied himself everything save the necessary decorums of
dress and lodging; he fasted like a saint, and slept hard as a hermit,
that he might spend upon these ungrateful creatures of his brain. They
were the work of his own hands, and so he saved the expense of their
construction; but there were many little outlays for materials and for
tools, which he could not avoid, and with him a little was all. They
not only famished him; they isolated him. His superiors in the church,
and his brother priests, looked with doubt or ridicule upon the labors
for which he shunned their company, while he gave up the other social
joys, few and small, which a priest might know in the Venice of that
day, when all generous spirits regarded him with suspicion for his
cloth's sake, and church and state were alert to detect disaffection or
indifference in him. But bearing these things willingly, and living as
frugally as he might, he had still not enough, and he had been fain to
assume the instruction of a young girl of old and noble family in
certain branches of polite learning which a young lady of that sort
might fitly know. The family was not so rich as it was old and noble,
and Don Ippolito was paid from its purse rather than its pride. But the
slender salary was a help; these patricians were very good to him; many
a time he dined with them, and so spared the cost of his own pottage at
home; they always gave him coffee when he came, and that was a saving;
at the proper seasons little presents from them were not wanting. In a
word, his condition was not privation. He did his duty as a teacher