for the benefit of a few old crones, had once been a Latin temple; it
had been built from the Corinthian pillars, the marble peristyle, the
rounded, open dome, like that of the Pantheon, of a pagan edifice;
and to these had been added a Longobardo belfry and chancel; pigeons
and doves roosted and nested in it, and within it was cold even in
midsummer, and dark always as a vault. It was dedicated to St.
Jerome, and was a world too wide for the shrunken band of believers
who came to worship in it; there was a high, dark altar said to have
been painted by Ribera, and nothing else that spoke in any way of
art, except the capitals of its pillars and the Roman mosaics of its
floor.

The Longobardo bell-tower was of vast height and strength; within it
were various chambers, and these chambers had served through many
ages as muniment-rooms. There were innumerable documents of many
different epochs, almost all in Latin, a few in Greek. Don Silverio,
who was a fine classic as well as a learned archæologist, spent all
his lonely and cold winter evenings in the study of these early
chronicles, his oil lamp burning pale and low, his little white dog
lying on his knees.

These manuscripts gave him great trouble, and were in many parts
almost unintelligible, in others almost effaced by damp, in others
again gnawed by rats and mice. But he was interested in his labours
and in his subject, and after several years of work on them, he was
able to make out a consecutive history of the Valdedera, and he was
satisfied that the peasant of the Terra Vergine had been directly
descended from the feudal-lords of Ruscino. That pittance of land by
the waterside under the shadow of the ruined citadel was all which
remained of the great fief of the youth in whose veins ran the blood