It had been Etruscan, it had been Latin, it had been Longobardo, it
had been Borgian and Papal; through all these changes a fortified
city, then a castellated town, then a walled village; and a village
it now remained. It will never be more; before many generations pass
it will probably have become still less; a mere tumulus, a mere
honeycomb of buried tombs. It was now perishing, surely though
slowly, but in peace, with the grass growing on its temple stairs and
the woodbine winding round its broken columns.

The trained and stored intellect of Don Silverio could set each
period of its story apart, and read all the vestiges remaining of
each. Ruscino was now to all others a mere poverty-stricken place,
brown and gaunt and sorrowful, scorching in the sun, with only the
river beneath it to keep it clean and alive. But to him it was as a
palimpsest of surpassing value and interest, which, sorely difficult
to decipher, held its treasures close from the profane and the
ignorant, but tempted and rewarded the scholar, like the lettering on
a Pompeian nuptial ring, the cyphers on a funeral urn of Herculaneum.
"After all, my lot might be worse than it is," he thought with
philosophy. "They might have sent me to a modern manufacturing town
in one of the Lombard provinces, or exiled me to some native
settlement in Eritrea."

Here, at least, he had history and nature, and he enjoyed thousands
of hours undisturbed in which to read or write, or muse and ponder on
this chronicle of brick and stone, this buried mass of dead men's
labours and of dead men's dust.

Doubtless, his manuscripts would lie unknown, unread; no man would
care for them; but the true scholar cares neither for public not