its highway had been kept clean and clear through the woods for
public and private conveyance, and when the clatter of horses' hoofs
and merry notes of horns had roused the echoes of its stones. In that
first half of the century, too, they had lived fairly well, and wine
and fowls had cost next to nothing, and home-made loaves had been
always large enough to give a beggar or a stray dog a slice. But
these times had long been over; every one was hungry now, and every
one a beggar, by way of change, and to make things equal, as the
people said, with dreary mirth and helpless acquiescence in their
lot. Like most riverain people, they lived chiefly by the river,
cutting and selling its canes, its sallows, its osiers, its sedges,
catching its fish, digging its sand; but there were few buyers in
this depopulated district.

Don Silverio Frascara, its vicar, had been sent thither as a
chastisement for his too sceptical and inquiring mind, his too
undisciplined temper. Nearly twenty years in this solitude had
chastened both; the fire had died out of his soul and the light out
of his eyes. His days were as monotonous as those of the blinded ass
set to turn the wine-press. All the steel of his spirit rusted, all
the brilliancy of his brain clouded; his life was like a fine rapier
which is left in a corner of a dusty attic and forgotten.

In certain rare states of the atmosphere the gold cross on St.
Peter's is visible from some of the peaks of the Abruzzese Apennines.
It looks like a speck of light far, far away in the silver-green of
the western horizon. When one day he climbed to such an altitude and
saw it thus, his heart contracted with a sickly pain, for in Rome he
had dreamed many dreams; and in Rome, until his exile to the Vale of
Edera, he had been a preacher of noted eloquence, of brilliant