often led their asses thither in hopes of making them prolific. My
memory was revered; each year at the return of Spring, the Bishop used
to come with his Clergy to pray over my bones, and I could watch far
away through the meadow grass the slow approach of Cross and Candle in
procession, the scarlet canopy, and the chanting acolytes. Thus it was,
my son, in the days of good King Berengar.

"Meantime, the Satyrs and the Satyr girls, the Fauns and Nymphs, dragged
out a wretched, wandering life. No more altars of meadow turf for them,
no more wreaths of flowers, no more offerings of milk and wheat and
honey. Only now and then at long intervals some goat-herd would
furtively lay a tiny cheese on the threshold of the sacred grot, whose
entrance was almost blocked now with thorns and brambles. But it was
merely the rabbits and squirrels came to eat these poor dainties. The
Nymphs were dwellers in distant forests and gloomy caves, driven forth
of their old homes by the apostles from the East. And to hinder their
ever returning more, the priests of the Galilean God poured over trees
and stones a charmed water, and pronounced magic words, and set up
crosses where roads met in the forest; for the Galilean, my son, is
learned in the art of incantations. Better than Saturn, better than
Jupiter, he knows the virtue of formularies and mystic signs. Thus the
poor rustic Divinities could no more find refuge in their sacred woods.
The company of long-haired, goat-footed Satyrs, that beat of yore their
mother earth with sounding hoof, was but a cloud of pale, dumb shadows
trailing along the mountain-side like the morning mist the Sun melts and
dispels.

"Buffeted, as by a fierce wind, by the wrath of Heaven, their spectral
forms would be whirled eddying all day long in the dust of the roads.
The night on the contrary was somewhat less hostile to them. Night is