just quitted. Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were
fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the
merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried
servants of the nobility. The very cripples who had groaned the loudest
in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace
remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics
strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.

It was strange to pass from this scene to the solitude of the grove,
where, in a twilight rustling with streams, the chapels lifted their
white porches. Peering through the grated door of each little edifice,
Odo beheld within a group of terra-cotta figures representing some scene
of the Passion--here a Last Supper, with a tigerish Judas and a Saint
John resting his yellow curls on his Master's bosom, there an Entombment
or a group of stricken Maries. These figures, though rudely modelled and
daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture
which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling
impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age
when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic
counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured
image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange
borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through
the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine
tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended
animation, and as he climbed from one shrine to another he had the sense
of treading the actual stones of Gethsemane and Calvary.

As was usual with him, the impressions of the moment had effaced those
preceding it, and it was almost with surprise that, at the rector's
door, he beheld the primo soprano of Pianura totter forth to the litter