by the grave murmur of organ music; men's voices mingling together
in mellow unison chanted the Magnificat, and the uplifted steady
harmony of the grand old anthem rose triumphantly above the noise
of the storm. The monks who inhabited this mountain eyrie, once a
fortress, now a religious refuge, were assembled in their little
chapel--a sort of grotto roughly hewn out of the natural rock.
Fifteen in number, they stood in rows of three abreast, their
white woollen robes touching the ground, their white cowls thrown
back, and their dark faces and flashing eyes turned devoutly
toward the altar whereon blazed in strange and solitary brilliancy
a Cross of Fire. At the first glance it was easy to see that they
were a peculiar Community devoted to some peculiar form of
worship, for their costume was totally different in character and
detail from any such as are worn by the various religious
fraternities of the Greek, Roman, or Armenian faith, and one
especial feature of their outward appearance served as a
distinctly marked sign of their severance from all known monastic
orders--this was the absence of the disfiguring tonsure. They were
all fine-looking men seemingly in the prime of life, and they
intoned the Magnificat not drowsily or droningly, but with a rich
tunefulness and warmth of utterance that stirred to a faint
surprise and contempt the jaded spirit of one reluctant listener
present among them. This was a stranger who had arrived that
evening at the monastery, and who intended remaining there for the
night--a man of distinguished and somewhat haughty bearing, with a
dark, sorrowful, poetic face, chiefly remarkable for its mingled
expression of dreamy ardor and cold scorn, an expression such as
the unknown sculptor of Hadrian's era caught and fixed in the
marble of his ivy-crowned Bacchus-Antinous, whose half-sweet,
half-cruel smile suggests a perpetual doubt of all things and all