came by a great company of cavaliers on horseback. To avoid being trampled to death, I climbed upon the rail, but a horse pushing against me, I straightway fell over. By ill chance I pitched on the head of a man who was bathing his feet in the river, and broke his neck; so he died, as much to my grief as to that of his relatives." This story however did not appease the wrath of the complainants. "Give him the utmost pain of the law, Messer Podesta," they cried; " our honor demands it." Good Messer Rubaconte was puzzled. An accident could not be punished as mur der, yet the man was dead, and Bagnai had undoubtedly killed him. He thought a few moments and then said : " Friends, your honor shall be maintained and your injury avenged. What has been done to you, you shall render to him. Let Bagnai go into the Arno to bathe his feet at the same spot, and one of you, the avengers of the dead man, must fall from the bridge on his neck, and so all shall have their due." The prosecutors' faces fell. They con sulted over the decision of the wise Podesta, and then concluded to drop the case. This same Bagnai, though innocent enough, seemed to have a decided faculty for getting into scrapes, and such peculiar scrapes that Messer Rubaconte's wisdom was more than once severely taxed to get him out of them. One day as Bagnai was walking down the road, his assistance was asked by a peasant whose donkey had fallen down. The man told him to take hold of the beast by the hind-quarters, while he himself would lift the donkey's head, and so lifting together they would get it on its legs. Bagnai, willing to oblige, seized the donkey's tail, and pulled so hard that he pulled it off. For this Bagnai was brought up before the Podesta. " I did not tell him to pull the tail off," said the complainant. To which Bagnai replied naively: "I thought a donkey's tail would have been better stuck on." Messer Rubaconte laughed heartily at
this, and advised the litigants to depart in peace, since, although the tail could not be stuck on again, the donkey was not by its loss incapacitated from carrying a load. "But how will he whisk off the flies?" cried the peasant, determined to find a grievance. Messer Rubaconte, turning the matter over in his mind, at length said : " Bagnai must perform the office which he has deprived the donkey of power to perform. He shall keep the donkey in his stall till his tail has grown again, and then return him to you." The peasant concluded that he would rather have a tailless donkey than no donkey at all, and so the case ended. On still another occasion Bagnai picked up a purse containing four hundred florins, and being honest and simple, he gave it up to a certain person who claimed it. This man, however, declared that one hundred florins were missing, and poor Bagnai had once again to face the Podesta. " Do you think it likely," asked the judge, " that this honest man has robbed from a purse which he lost no time in returning to its owner?" "No," replied the prosecutor, " but this is not mine, for mine had five hundred florins in it." " Indeed! " said the Podesta; "then my judgment is that Bagnai shall keep this purse till you find one with five hundred florins; you, meanwhile, giving him security that this is not yours." The decision stood, and the prosecutor was sent off about his business. Scaliger relates an interesting story which may be told in this connection and will af ford variety. Macaire, one of the body guard of Charles V of France, one day enticed his comrade Aubrey de Montdidier into the forest of Bondy, and there murdered him. The murdered man's dog, which had been running about, did not come up until his master's body had been buried by the assassin. The faithful creature threw itself on the new-made grave, and there remained until driven off by hunger. Day after day it would seek food and return, until at length
