left to rot in noisome heaps upon the sands, because there was no one to purchase them and no means to carry them to other towns. Now and then they took the fish on mules to Grosseto or other places on the line of rail, but there was little sale for it; and before it could be passed through the gates of any town there was so heavy a tax on it that it paid no one to load a felucca's deck or a beast's panniers with so perishable a thing.
So Santa Tarsilla was sad and solitary always, and usually sickly enough; there was never any mirth or joviality in it; the young men grew impatient of its loneliness and poverty, and always went away as soon as they reached years enough to be their own masters. There were only a few old men, and some women and children; all the stronger folk who had been born in it were elsewhere, coral fishing in the south, doing forest work on the hills, or gone to live at Follonica where the foundries are.
Only the feeble, the old, and the very poor stayed in the little bay that had once been a great port for the galleys of Porsenna, as Joconda did, who had neither means nor strength to move away to a cooler land.
