"On the 21st I made my first visit to him, which of course had no other object than that of delivering my credentials. I expressed my regret at the emperor's absence, and the consequent delay of such business as was rendered particularly urgent by the necessity of sending home the frigate and by the approaching session of Congress, as well as by the distressed situation of those American citizens who were awaiting the result of decisions which might be hastened by the expositions I was charged to make on the part of the President of the United States. He said the emperor had foreseen the urgency of the case, and had charged him to remedy the evil, as far as could be done, by dispensing with my presentation to His Majesty till his return, and that I might immediately proceed to business as if I had been presented. He said the most flattering things from the emperor relative to my appointment. He observed that His Majesty had expected my arrival with some solicitude, and was disposed to do everything that I could reasonably ask to maintain a good intelligence between the two countries.... I explained to him with as much precision as possible the sentiments of the President on the most pressing objects of my mission, and threw in such observations as seemed to arise out of what I conceived to be the true interests of France. He heard me with patience and apparent solicitude, endeavored to explain away some of the evils of which we complain, and expressed a strong desire to explain away the rest. He said that many of the ideas I suggested were new to him, and were very important—that he should lay them before the emperor with fidelity and in a manner calculated to produce the most favorable impression; desired me to reduce them to writing, to be presented in a more solemn form; and endeavored to convince me that he doubted not our being able on the return of the emperor to remove all obstacles to a most perfect harmony between the two countries."

In a letter dated December 19, 1811, he writes:

"Since the date of my last I have had many interviews with the Minister of Foreign Relations. I have explained several points, and urged every argument for as speedy an answer to my note of the 10th as its very serious importance would allow. He always treats the subject with apparent candor and solicitude, seems anxious to gain information, and declares that neither he nor the emperor had before understood American affairs, and always assures me that he is nearly ready with his answer. But he says the emperor's taking so long a time to consider it and make up his decision is not without reason, for it opens a wide field for meditation on very interesting matters. He says the emperor has read the note repeatedly and with great attention—that he told him the reasoning in it was everywhere just and the conclusions undeniable, but to reconcile its principles with his continental system presented difficulties not easy to remove. From what the emperor told me himself at the last diplomatic audience, and from a variety of hints and other circumstances remarked among the people about his person, I have been made to believe that he is really changing his system relative to our trade, and that the answer to my note will be more satisfactory than I had at first expected."

Several other letters from the poet to Monroe follow, all of the same general tenor—complaining of delay, yet hopeful that the treaty would shortly be secured. February 8, 1812, he writes to the Secretary of State that the duke is "at work upon the treaty, and probably in good earnest, but the discussions with Russia and the other affairs of this Continent give him and the emperor so much occupation that I cannot count upon their getting on very fast with ours."

Amid these delays the summer passed away, and the emperor, intent on mapping out his great campaign against Russia, still neglected to sign the important instrument. Early in the summer Napoleon left Paris for Wilna to take command of the vast armies that had been collected for the invasion, and from that place, on the 11th of October, the duke de Bassano addressed the following note to Mr. Barlow in Paris:

"SIR: I have had the honor to make known to you how much I regretted, in the negotiation commenced between the United States and France, the delays which inevitably attended a correspondence carried on at so great a distance. Your government has desired to see the epoch of this arrangement draw near: His Majesty is animated by the same dispositions, and, willing to assure to the negotiation a result the most prompt, he has thought that it would be expedient to suppress the intermediaries and to transfer the conference to Wilna. His Majesty has in consequence authorized me, sir, to treat directly with you; and if you will come to this town I dare hope that, with the desire which animates us both to conciliate such important interests, we shall immediately be enabled to remove all the difficulties which until now have appeared to impede the progress of the negotiation. I have apprised the duke of Dalberg that his mission was thus terminated, and I have laid before His Majesty the actual state of the negotiation, to the end that when you arrive at Wilna, the different questions being already illustrated either by your judicious observation or by the instructions I shall have received, we may, sir, conclude an arrangement so desirable and so conformable to the mutually amicable views of our two governments."

Barlow could do no less than comply with this invitation, since, as he remarked in a letter to Monroe under date of October 25, "it was impossible to refuse it without giving offence." His letter accepting the duke's invitation was probably the last ever written by him, and is dated Paris, October 25, 1812:

"SIR: In consequence of the letter you did me the honor to write me on the 11th of this month, I accept your invitation, and leave Paris to-morrow for Wilna, where I hope to arrive in fifteen or eighteen days from this date. The negotiation on which you have done me the honor to invite me at Wilna is so completely prepared in all its parts between the duke of Dalberg and myself, and, as I understand, sent on to you for your approbation about the 18th of the present month, that I am persuaded that if it could have arrived before the date of your letter the necessity of this meeting would not have existed, as I am confident His Majesty would have found the project reasonable and acceptable in all its parts, and would have ordered that minister to conclude and sign both the treaty of commerce and the convention of indemnities."

Barlow left Paris for Wilna on the 26th of October in his private carriage, yet travelling night and day and with relays of horses at the post-towns to expedite his progress. His sole companion was his nephew and secretary of legation, Thomas Barlow, who had been educated and given an honorable position in life through the poet's munificence. Their route, the same as that pursued by Napoleon a few weeks before, led across the Belgian frontiers and through the forests and defiles of the German principalities. Once across the Niemen, they met with rumors of the emperor's disaster at Moscow, and that portions of his army were then in full retreat, but, discrediting them, pushed on to Wilna, which they reached about the 1st of December. Wilna is the only considerable village in Russia between the Niemen and Moscow: it is a quaint and venerable town, capital of the ancient province of Lithuania, and played an important part in Napoleon's Russian campaign, being the rendezvous of his legions after crossing the Niemen and the site of his army-hospitals. When our travellers entered it, it was filled with a horde of panic-stricken fugitives, who made the town a temporary resting-place before continuing their flight to the frontiers; nor were they long in learning the, to them, distressing news that the French army was in swift retreat, and that the duke de Bassano, so far from being at leisure to attend a diplomatic conference at Wilna, was then on the frontiers hurrying forward reinforcements to cover the retreat of his emperor across the Beresina.

The perilous journey had been made in vain, and the treaty was doomed to still further delay. It now only remained for Barlow to extricate himself from his dangerous position and to reach the frontiers before the fleeing army and the pursuing Cossacks should close every avenue of escape.

Thomas Barlow on his return to America sometimes favored his friends with vivid pictures of the sufferings and privations endured by the travellers in their flight from Wilna. The passage of so many men had rendered the roads well-nigh impassable; food, even of the meanest kind, could only be procured with the greatest difficulty; and often the travellers were mixed up with the flying masses, as it seemed inextricably. Ruined habitations, wagons and provision-vans overturned and pillaged, men dying by scores from hunger and starvation, and frozen corpses of men and horses, were objects that constantly presented themselves. At length they crossed the Niemen and pursued their journey through Poland, still suffering terribly from the cold and from the insufficient nature of the food obtainable; but on reaching Zarrow,[C] an obscure village near Cracow, the poet was seized with a sudden and fatal attack of pneumonia, the result, no doubt, of privation and exposure. He was borne to a little Jewish cottage, the only inn that the village afforded, and there died December 26, 1812. His remains were interred in the little churchyard of the village where he died. It is rarely that an American visits his grave, and the government has never taken interest enough in its minister to erect a memorial slab above his dust; but wifely devotion has supplied the omission, and a plain monument of marble, on which are inscribed his name, age and station and the circumstances of his death, marks the poet's place of sepulture.

The news of his death seems not to have reached the United States until the succeeding March. The Federal journals merely announced the fact without comment: the Republican papers published formal eulogiums on the dead statesman. President Madison, in his inaugural of 1813, thus referred to the event: "The sudden death of the distinguished citizen who represented the United States in France, without any special arrangement by him for such a conclusion, has kept us without the expected sequel to his last communications; nor has the French government taken any measures for bringing the depending negotiations to a conclusion through its representative in the United States."

In France the poet's demise excited a more general feeling of regret, perhaps, than in his own country. A formal eulogy on his life and character was pronounced by Dupont de Nemours before the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, and the year succeeding his death an account of his life and writings was published at Paris in quarto form, accompanied by one canto of The Columbiad, translated into French heroic verse. The American residents of Paris also addressed a letter of condolence to Mrs. Barlow, in which is apparent the general sentiment of respect and affection entertained for the poet in the French capital.

"In private life," says one of his eulogists, "Mr. Barlow was highly esteemed for his amiable temperament and many social excellences. His manners were generally grave and dignified, and he possessed but little facility of general conversation, but with his intimate friends he was easy and familiar, and upon topics which deeply interested him he conversed with much animation."

Another thus refers to his domestic relations: "The affection of Mr. Barlow for his lovely wife was unusually strong, and on her part it was fully reciprocated. She cheerfully in early life cast in her lot with his 'for better or for worse'—and sometimes the worst, so far as their pecuniary prospects were concerned. In their darkest days Barlow ever found light and encouragement at home in the smiles, sympathy and counsel of his prudent, faithful wife. No matter how dark and portentous the cloud that brooded over them might be, she always contrived to give it a silver lining, and his subsequent success in life he always attributed more to her influence over him than to anything else."

Barlow lived a dual life—the life of a poet as well as of a diplomatist—and this paper can scarcely be considered complete unless it touches somewhat on his literary productions. It will be the verdict of all who study his life carefully that he was a better statesman than poet, and a better philanthropist than either; yet as a poet he surpassed his contemporaries, producing works that fairly entitle him to the distinction of being the father of American letters. His Hasty Pudding would be a valuable addition to any literature, and in his Advice to the Privileged Orders and his Conspiracy of Kings much poetic power and insight is apparent. It was on his epic of The Columbiad that he no doubt founded his hopes of fame, but, though the book was extensively read in its day and passed through several editions on both continents, no reprint has been demanded in modern times, and it long since dropped out of the category of books that are read.

Barlow's private letters from abroad would have possessed undoubted interest to the present generation, but, so far as is known, none of them have been preserved—with one exception, however. There is in existence a long letter of his, written to his wife while he was in Algiers in imminent danger from the plague, and which was to be forwarded to her only in case of his death. It was found among his papers after his death nearly sixteen years later. This letter has already appeared in print, but it will be new to most of our readers, and it is so remarkable in itself, and throws such light on the character of the writer, that, in spite of its length, no apology is required for inserting it here:

"To Mrs. Barlow in Paris:

"ALGIERS, 8th July, 1796.

"MY DEAREST LIFE AND ONLY LOVE: I run no risk of alarming your extreme sensibility by writing this letter, since it is not my intention that it shall come into your hands unless and until, through some other channel, you shall be informed of the event which it anticipates as possible. For our happy union to be dissolved by death is indeed at every moment possible; but at this time there is an uncommon degree of danger that you may lose a life which I know you value more than you do your own. I say I know this, because I have long been taught, from our perfect sympathy of affection, to judge your heart by mine; and I can say solemnly and truly, as far as I know myself, that I have no other value for my own life than as a means of continuing a conjugal union with the best of women—the wife of my soul, my first, my last, my only love. I have told you in my current letters that the plague is raging with considerable violence in this place. I must tell you in this, if it should be your fortune to see it, that a pressing duty of humanity requires me to expose myself more than other considerations would justify in endeavoring to save as many of our unhappy citizens as possible from falling a sacrifice, and to embark them at this cruel moment for their country. Though they are dying very fast, it is possible that my exertions may be the means of saving a number who otherwise would perish. If this should be the case, and I should fall instead of them, my tender, generous friend must not upbraid my memory by ever thinking I did too much. But she cannot help it: I know she cannot. Yet, my dearest love, give me leave, since I must anticipate your affliction, to lay before you some reflections which would recur to you at last, but which ought to strike your mind at first, to mingle with and assuage your first emotions of grief. You cannot judge at your distance of the risk I am taking, nor of the necessity of taking it; and I am convinced that were you in my place you would do more than I shall do, for your kind, intrepid spirit has more courage than mine, and always had.

"Another consideration: Many of these persons have wives at home as well as I, from whom they have been much longer separated, under more affecting circumstances, having been held in a merciless and desponding slavery: if their wives love them as mine does me (a thing I cannot believe, but have no right to deny), ask these lately disconsolate and now joyous families whether I have done too much.

"Since I write this as if it were my last poor demonstration of affection to my lovely friend, I have much to say; and it is with difficulty that I can steal an hour from the fatigue of business to devote to the grateful, painful task. But tell me (you cannot tell me) where shall I begin? where shall I end? how shall I put an eternal period to a correspondence which has given me so much comfort? With what expression of regret shall I take leave of my happiness? with what words of tenderness, of gratitude, of counsel, of consolation, shall I pay you for what I am robbing you of—the husband whom you cherish, the friend who is all your own?

"But I am giving vent to more weakness than I intended: this, my dear, is a letter of business, not of love, and I wonder I cannot enter upon it and keep to my subject. Enclosed is my last will, made in conformity to the one I left in the hands of Doctor Hopkins of Hartford, as you may remember. The greater part of our property now lying in Paris, I thought proper to renew this instrument, that you might enter immediately upon the settlement of your affairs, without waiting to send to America for the other paper.

"You will likewise find enclosed a schedule of our property debts and demands, with explanations, as nearly just as I can make it from memory in the absence of my papers. If the French Republic is consolidated, and her funds rise to par, or near it, as I believe they will do soon after the war, the effects noted in this schedule may amount to a capital of about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, besides paying my debts; which sum, vested in the American funds or mortgages equally solid, would produce something more than seven thousand dollars a year perpetual income.

"If the French should fund their debt anew at one-half its nominal value (which is possible), so that the part of your property now vested in those funds should diminish in proportion, still, taking the whole together, it will not make a difference of more than one-third, and the annual income may still be near five thousand dollars. Events unforeseen by me may, however, reduce it considerably lower. But, whatever may be the value of what I leave, it is left simply and wholly to you.

"Perhaps some of my relations may think it strange that I have not mentioned them in this final disposition of my effects, especially if they should prove to be as considerable as I hope they may. But, my dearest love, I will tell you my reasons, and I hope you will approve them; for if I can excuse myself to you in a point in which your generous delicacy would be more likely to question the propriety of my conduct than in most others, I am sure my arguments will be convincing to those whose objections may arise from their interest.

"First. In a view of justice and equity, whatever we possess at this moment is a joint property between ourselves, and ought to remain to the survivor. When you gave me your blessed self you know I was destitute of every other possession, as of every other enjoyment: I was rich only in the fund of your affectionate economy and the sweet consolation of your society. In our various struggles and disappointments while trying to obtain a moderate competency for the quiet enjoyment of what we used to call the remainder of our lives, I have been rendered happy by misfortunes, for the heaviest we have met with were turned into blessings by the opportunities they gave me to discover new virtues in you, who taught me how to bear them.

"I have often told you since the year 1791, the period of our deepest difficulties (and even during that period), that I had never been so easy and contented before; and I have certainly been happier in you during the latter years of our union than I was in former years; not that I have loved you more ardently or more exclusively, for that was impossible, but I have loved you better: my heart has been more full of your excellence and less agitated with objects of ambition, which used to devour me too much.

"I recall these things to your mind to convince you of my full belief that the acquisition of the competency which we seem at last to have secured is owing more to your energy than my own: I mean the energy of your virtues, which gave me consolation, and even happiness, under circumstances wherein, if I had been alone or with a partner no better than myself, I should have sunk.

"These fruits of our joint exertions you expected to enjoy with me, else I know you would not have wished for them. But if by my death you are to be deprived of the greater part of the comfort you expected, it would surely be unjust and cruel to deprive you of the remainder, or any portion of it, by giving any part of this property to others. It is yours in the truest sense in which property can be considered; and I should have no right, if I were disposed, to take it from you.

"Secondly. Of my relations, I have some thirty or forty, nephews and nieces and their children, the greater part of whom I have never seen, and from whom I have had no news for seven or eight years. Among them there may be some necessitous ones who would be proper objects of particular legacies, yet it would be impossible for me at this moment to know which they are. It was my intention, and still is if I live, to go to America, to make discrimination among them according to their wants, and to give them such relief as might be in my power, without waiting to do it by legacy. Now, my lovely wife, if this task and the means of performing it should devolve upon you, I need not recommend it: our joint liberality would have been less extensive and less grateful to the receivers than yours will be alone.

"Your own relations in the same degree of affinity are few in number. I hope I need not tell you that in my affections I know no difference between yours and mine. I include them all in the same recommendation, without any other distinction than what may arise from their wants and your ability to do them good.

"If Colonel B—— or his wife (either of them being left by the other) should be in a situation otherwise than comfortable, I wish my generous friend to render it so as far as may be in her power. We may have had more powerful friends than they, but never any more sincere. He has the most frank and loyal spirit in the world, and she is possessed of many amiable and almost heroic virtues.

"Mary——, poor girl!—you know her worth, her virtues, and her talents, and I am sure you will not fail to keep yourself informed of her circumstances. She has friends, or at least had them, more able than you will be to yield her assistance in case of need. But they may forsake her for reasons which to your enlightened and benevolent mind would rather be an additional inducement to contribute to her happiness. Excuse me, my dearest life, for my being so particular on a subject which, considering to whom it is addressed, may appear superfluous; but I do it rather to show that I agree with you in these sentiments than to pretend that they originate on my part. With this view I must pursue them a little further. One of the principal gratifications in which I intended, and still intend to indulge myself if I should live to enjoy with you the means of doing it, is to succor the unfortunate of every description as far as possible—to encourage merit where I find it, and try to create it where it does not exist. This has long been a favorite project with me; but, having always been destitute of the means of carrying it into effect to any considerable degree, I have not conversed with you upon it as much as I wish I had. Though I can say nothing that will be new to you on the pleasure of employing one's attention and resources in this way, yet some useful hints might be given on the means of multiplying good actions from small resources; for I would not confine my pleasure to the simple duties of charity in the beggar's sense of the word.

"First. Much may be done by advising with poor persons, contriving for them, and pointing out the objects on which they can employ their own industry.

"Secondly. Many persons and families in a crisis of difficulty might be extricated and set up in the world by little loans of money, for which they might give good security and refund within a year; and the same fund might then go to relieve a second and a third; and thus a dozen families might be set on the independent footing of their own industry in the course of a dozen years by the help of fifty dollars, and the owner lose nothing but the interest. Some judgment would be necessary in these operations, as well as care and attention in finding out the proper objects. How many of these are to be found in prisons, thrown in and confined for years, for small debts which their industry and their liberty would enable them to discharge in a short time! Imprisonment for debt still exists as a stain upon our country, as most others. France, indeed, has set us the example of abolishing it, but I am apprehensive she will relapse from this, as I see she is inclined to do from many other good things which she began in her magnanimous struggle for the renovation of society.

"Thirdly. With your benevolence, your character and connections, you may put in motion a much greater fund of charity than you will yourself possess. It is by searching out the objects of distress or misfortune, and recommending them to their wealthy neighbors in such a manner as to excite their attention. I have often remarked to you (I forget whether you agree with me in it or not) that there is more goodness at the bottom of the human heart than the world will generally allow. Men are as often hindered from doing a generous thing by an indolence either of thought or action as by a selfish principle. If they knew what the action was, when and where it was to be done and how to do it, their obstacles would be overcome. In this manner one may bring the resources of others into contribution, and with such a grace as to obtain the thanks both of the givers and receivers.

"Fourthly. The example of one beneficent person, like yourself, in a neighborhood or a town would go a great way. It would doubtless be imitated by others, extend far, and benefit thousands whom you might never hear of.

"I certainly hope to escape from this place and return to your beloved arms. No man has stronger inducements to wish to live than I have. I have no quarrel with the world: it has used me as well as could be expected. I have valuable friends in every country where I have put my foot, not excepting this abominable sink of wickedness, pestilence and folly—the city of Algiers. I have a pretty extensive and dear-bought knowledge of mankind; a most valuable collection of books; a pure and undivided taste for domestic tranquillity, the social intercourse of friends, study, and the exercise of charity. I have a moderate but sufficient income, perfect health, an unimpaired constitution, and, to give the relish to all enjoyments and smooth away the asperities that might arise from unforeseen calamities, I have the wife that my youth chose and my advancing age has cherished—the pattern of excellence, the example of every virtue—from whom all my joys have risen, in whom all my hopes are centred.

"I will use every precaution for my safety, as well for your sake as mine. But if you should see me no more, my dearest friend, you will not forget I loved you. As you have valued my love, and as you believe this letter is written with an intention to promote your happiness at a time when it will be for ever out of my power to contribute to it in any other way, I beg you will kindly receive the last advice I can give you, with which I am going to close our endearing intercourse.... Submitting with patience to a destiny that is unavoidable, let your tenderness for me soon cease to agitate that lovely bosom: banish it to the house of darkness and dust, with the object that can no longer be benefited by it, and transfer your affections to some worthy person who shall supply my place in the relation I have borne to you. It is for the living, not the dead, to be rendered happy by the sweetness of your temper, the purity of your heart, your exalted sentiments, your cultivated spirit, your undivided love. Happy man of your choice should he know and prize the treasure of such a wife! Oh, treat her tenderly, my dear sir: she is used to nothing but kindness, unbounded love and confidence. She is all that any reasonable man can desire. She is more than I have merited, or perhaps than you can merit. My resigning her to your charge, though but the result of uncontrollable necessity, is done with a degree of cheerfulness—a cheerfulness inspired by the hope that her happiness will be the object of your care and the long-continued fruit of your affection.

"Farewell, my wife; and though I am not used to subscribe my letters addressed to you, your familiarity with my writing having always rendered it unnecessary, yet it seems proper that the last characters which this hand shall trace for your perusal should compose the name of your most faithful, most affectionate and most grateful husband,

"JOEL BARLOW."

After her husband's decease Mrs. Barlow returned to America, and continued to reside at Kalorama until her death in 1818.

CHARLES BURR TODD.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] The name is variously written Zarrow, Zarniwica and Zarrowitch.



TERESA DI FAENZA.

I.

If he should wed a woman like a flower, Fresh as the dew and royal as a rose, Veined with spring-fire, mesmeric in repose, His world-vext brain to lull with mystic power, Great-souled to track his flight through heavens starred, Upborne by wings of trust and love, yet meek As one who has no self-set goal to seek, His inspiration and his best reward, At once his Art's deep secret and clear crown, His every-day made dream, his dream fulfilled,— If such a wife he wooed to be his own, God knows 'twere well. Even I no less had willed. Yet, O my heart! wouldst thou for his dear sake Frankly rejoice, or with self-pity break?

II.

What could I bring in dower? A restless heart, As eager, ardent, hungry, as his own, Face burned pale olive by our Southern sun, A mind long used to musings grave apart. Gold, noble name or fame I ne'er regret, Albeit all are lacking; but the glow Of spring-like beauty, but the overflow Of simple, youthful joy. And yet—and yet— A proud voice whispers: Vain may be his quest, What fruit soe'er he pluck, what laurels green, Through all the world, for just this prize unseen I in my deep heart harbor quite unguessed: I alone know what full hands I should bring Were I to lay my wealth before my king.

EMMA LAZARUS.



PIPISTRELLO.

I am only Pipistrello. Nothing but that—nothing more than any one of the round brown pebbles that the wind sets rolling down the dry bed of the Tiber in summer.

I am Pipistrello, the mime, the fool, the posturer, the juggler, the spangled saltinbanco, the people's plaything, that runs and leaps and turns and twists, and laughs at himself and is laughed at by all, and lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear and his cousin the monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap.

I am Pipistrello, five-and-twenty years old, and strong as you see, and good to look at, the women have said. I can leap and run against any man, and I can break a bar of iron against my knee, and I can keep up with the fastest horse that flies, and I can root up a young oak without too much effort. I am strong enough, and my life is at the full, and a day's sickness I never have known, and my mother is living. Yet I lie under sentence of death, and to-morrow I die on the scaffold: if nothing come between this and the break of dawn, I am a dead man with to-morrow's sun.

And nothing will come: why should it?

I am only Pipistrello. The people have loved me, indeed, but that is no reason why the law should spare me. Nor would I wish that it should—not I. They come and stand and stare at me through the grating, men and women and maidens and babies. A few of them cry a little, and one little mite of a child thrusts at me with a little brown hand the half of a red pomegranate. But for the most part they laugh. Why, of course they do. The street-children always laugh to see a big black steer with his bold horned head go down under the mace of the butcher: the street always finds that droll. The strength of the bull could scatter the crowd as the north wind scatters the dust, if he were free; but he is not, and his strength serves him nothing: the hammer fells him and the crowd laughs.

The people of this old Orte know me so well. Right and left, up and down, through the country I have gone all the years of my life. Wherever there was fair or festa, there was I, Pipistrello, in the midst. It is not a bad life, believe me. No life is bad that has the sun and the rain upon it, and the free will of the feet and the feel of the wind, and nothing between it and heaven.

My father had led the same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time, thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would have thrown a ball or an orange.

My mother was a young and gentle creature, full of tenderness for her own people, with strangers shy and afraid. She was the daughter of a poor weaver. My father had found and wooed her in Etruria, and although he had never taken the trouble to espouse her before the mayor, yet he had loved her and had always treated her with great respect. She was a woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all and see all, crouching in their hapless gloom.

When my father died thus at Genoa my mother took a hatred for that manner of living, and she broke off all ties with the athletes who had been his comrades, and, taking the little money that was hers in a little leather bag, she fled away with me to the old town of Orte, where my grandmother still lived, the widow of the weaver. The troop wished to keep me with them, for, although I was but five years old, I was supple and light and very fearless, and never afraid of being thrown up in the air, a living ball, in their games and sports.

Orte was just the same then as it is now. These very aged towns I think never change: if you try to alter them you must break them up and destroy them utterly. Orte has known the Etruscans: she can very well do without modern folk. At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in one room that looked over the river—a large vaulted chamber with grated casements, with thick stone walls—a chamber in what had once been a palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful—of a pale, serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning.

My mother had many suitors. She was beautiful of face, as I say, like one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me, caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them. When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? She repulsed them all, always. She lived, lonely and sad, as well as she could in our great garret: we ate little, our bed was hard, and she and my grandam labored hard to get a pittance. But when a rich bailiff sought her in honest marriage, she kissed me and wept over me, and said again and again, "No, no! To your father I will be faithful, let what will chance to us."

The bailiff soon consoled himself: he married a big country wench who had a fine rope of pearls and gold bracelets, and I continued to grow up by my mother's side where the Tiber is gilded with the gold of the dawns and rolls its heavy waves under the weeping boughs of its willows. My boyish strength increased in the heat of the summers, and I grew like a young brown stalk of the tall maize. I herded the cow, cut the rushes and hewed wood, and I was always happy, even when my mother would send me to the old priest to learn things out of books. She wished to make a monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish frock and a whitewashed cell? Ouf! I put my fingers in my ears and ran away whenever my poor mother talked of the cloister.

My limbs were always dancing, and my blood was always leaping, laughing, boiling merrily in my veins. A priest? What an idea! I had never wholly forgotten the glad, bright days of childhood when my father had thrown me about in the air like a ball: I had never wholly forgotten the shouts of the people, the sight of the human sea of faces, the loud, frank laugh of the populace, the sparkle of the spangled habit, the intoxication of the applause of a crowd. I had only been five years old then, yet I remembered, and sometimes in the night I cried bitterly for those dead days. I had only been a little brown thing, with curls as black as the raven's wing, and they had thrown me from one to the other lightly, laughingly, like a ripe apple, like a smooth peach. But I had known what it was to get drunk on the "hurrahs" of the multitude, and I did not forget them as I grew up here a youth in old Orte.

The son of an athlete can never rest quiet at home and at school like the children of cobblers and coppersmiths and vine-dressers. All my life was beating in me, tumbling, palpitating, bubbling, panting in me—moving incessantly, like the wings of a swallow when the hour draws near for its flight and the thirst for the south rises in it. With all my force I adored my pale, lovely, Madonna-like mother, but all the same, as I trotted toward the priest with a satchel on my back, I used to think, Would it be very wicked to throw the books into the river and run away to the fields? And, in truth, I used to run away very often, scampering over the country around Orte like a mountain-hare, climbing the belfries of the churches, pulling off their weathercocks or setting their bells a-ringing—doing a thousand and one mischievous antics; but I always returned at nightfall to my mother's side. It seemed to me it would be cruel and cowardly to leave her, for she had but me in the world.

"You promise to be sensible and quiet, Pippo?" the poor soul always murmured. And I used to say "Yes," and mean it. But can a bird promise not to fly when it feels in its instincts the coming of spring? Can a young colt promise not to fling out his limbs when he feels the yielding turf beneath his hoofs?

I never wished to be disobedient, but, somehow, ten minutes after I was out of her sight I was high above on some tower or belfry, with the martens and the pigeons circling about my curly head. I was so happy on high there, looking down on all the old town misty with dust, the men and women like ants on an antheap, the historic river like a mere ribbon, yellow and twisted, the palaces and the tombs all hidden under the same gray veil of summer dust! I was so happy there!—and they spoke of making me into a monk, or, if I would not hear of that, of turning me into a clerk in a notary's office!

A monk? a clerk? when all the trees cried out to me to climb and all the birds called to me to fly! I used to cry about it with hot tears that stung my face like lashes, lying with my head hidden on my arms in the grass by the old Tiber water. For I was not twelve years old, and to be shut up in Orte always, growing gray and wrinkled as the notary had done over the wicked, crabbed, evil-looking skins that set the neighbors at war! The thought broke my heart. Nevertheless, I loved my mother, and I mended my quills, and tried to write my best, and said to the boys of the town, "I cannot bend iron or leap or race any more. I am going to write for my bread in the notary's office a year hence, for my mother wishes it, and so it must be."

And I did my best not to look up to the jackdaws circling round the towers or the old river running away to Rome. For all the waters cried to me to leap, and all the birds to fly. And you cannot tell, unless you have been born to do it as I was, how good it is to climb and climb and climb, and see the green earth grow pale beneath you, and the people dwindle till they are small as dust, and the houses fade till they seem like heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and the roofs that cover them, and the sails of their ships in the ocean. Men are so far from you, and heaven seems so near! The fields and the plains are lost in the vapors that divide you from them, and all their noise of living multitudes comes very faintly to your ear, and sweetly like the low murmuring of bees in the white blossoms of an acacia in the month of May.

But you do not understand, you poor toilers in cities who pace the street and watch the faces of the rich.

I was to be a notary's clerk—I, called Pipistrello (the bat) because I was always whirling and wheeling in air. I was to be a clerk, so my mother and grandmother decided for me, with the old notary himself who lived at the corner, and made his daily bread by carrying fire and sword where he could through the affairs of his neighbors. He was an old rascal, but my mother did not know that: he promised to be a safe and trustworthy guardian of my youth, and she believed he had power to keep me safe from all dangers of destiny. She wanted to be sure that I should never run the risks of my father's career: she wanted to see me always before the plate of herb soup on her table. Poor mother!

One day in Orte chance gave me another fate than this of her desires.

One fine sunrise on the morning of Palm Sunday I heard the sharp sound of a screeching fife, the metallic clash of cymbals, the shouts of boys, the rattle of a little drum. It was the rataplan beating before a troop of wrestlers and jugglers who were traversing the Marche and Reggio Emilia. The troop stationed themselves in a little square burnt by the sun and surrounded by old crumbling houses: I ran with the rest of the lads of Orte to see them. Orte was in holiday guise: aged, wrinkled, deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that day with palms and lilies and lilac and the branches of willow; and her people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and the churches and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and pressure around the play-place of the strollers.

It was in the month of April: outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of millions of daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my youth! I am old now—ay, old, though I have lived through only twenty-five years.

This afternoon, on Palm Sunday, I ran to see the athletes as a moth flies to the candle: in Italy all the world loves the saltinbanco, be he dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed: I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my brothers! Were they not my brothers all?

This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes.

It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say, intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with longing;—and my mother destined me to a notary's desk, and wished me to be shut there all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all the crimes, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of gold! She wished to make me a notary's clerk! I gazed at these men who seemed to me so happy—these slender, agile, vigorous creatures in their skins that shone like the skins of green snakes, in their broidered, glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps with the white plume in each. "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished crossed the cord that marked their arena and threw his strong arms about me, and cried, "Body of Christ! you are little Pippo!" For he had been my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went with them.

It was wickedly done, for my poor mother slept, knowing nothing, when in the dusk before daybreak I slipped through the bars of the casement and noiselessly dropped on to a raft in the river below, and thence joined my new friends. It was wickedly done; but I could not help it. Fate was stronger than I.

The old man did not disturb himself as to whether what he had encouraged me to do was ill or well. He foresaw in me an athlete who would do him honor and make the ducats ring merrier in his purse. Besides, I had cost him nothing.

From this time life indeed began for me. I wept often; I felt the barb of a real remorse; when I passed a crucifix on the road I trembled with true terror and penitence; but I fled away, always. I drew my girdle closer about my spangled coat, and, despite all my remorse, I was happy. When I was very, very far away I wrote to my mother, and she understood, poor soul! that there were no means of forcing me back to her. Children are egotists: childhood has little feeling. When the child suffers he thirsts for his mother, but when he is happy, alas! he thinks little and rarely about her.

I was very happy, full of force and of success: the men kept their word and taught me all their tricks, all their exploits. Soon I surpassed my teachers in address and in temerity. I soon became the glory of their band. In the summertime we wandered over the vast Lombard plains and the low Tuscan mountains; in winter we displayed our prowess in Rome, in Naples, in Palermo; we loitered wherever the sun was warm or the people liked to laugh.

From time to time I thought of my mother: I sent her money. I shivered a little when I saw a Madonna, for all Madonnas have the smile that our mother has for our infancy. I thought of her, but I never went home. I was Pipistrello the champion-wrestler. I was a young Hercules, with a spangled tunic in lieu of a lion-skin. I was a thousand years, ten thousand leagues, away from the child of Orte. God is just. It is just that I die here, for in my happy years I forgot my mother. I lived in the sunlight—before the crowds, the nervous crowds of Italy—singing, shouting, leaping, triumphing; and I forgot my mother alone in the old chamber above the Tiber—quite alone, for my grandam was dead. That I have slain what I have slain—that is nothing. I would do the same thing again had I to live my life again. Yes, without pause or mercy would I do it. But my mother—she has lived alone, and she is mad. That is my crime.

I was a tall, strong youth, full of courage and handsome to the eye of women: I led a life noisy and joyous, and for ever in movement. I was what my father had been before me. So they all said. Only I liked to finger a book, and my father never had looked inside one, and out of remembrance of the belief of my mother I uncovered my head as I passed a church or saw a shrine, and to do this had not been in my father's habits. In these years I made a great deal of money—a great deal, at least, for a stroller—but it went as fast as it came. I was never a vicious man, nor a great gambler or drinker, yet my plump pieces soon took wing from my pocket, for I was very gay and I liked to play a lover's part. My life was a good life, that I know: as for the life of the rich and of the noble, I cannot tell what it is like, but I think it is of a surety more gloomy and mournful than mine. In Italy one wants so little. The air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses and marbles,—these are enough, these are happiness in Italy. And it is not difficult to have thus much, or was not so in those days. I was never very poor, but whenever money jingled in my purse I treated all the troop and half the town, and we laughed loud till daybreak.

I was never aught save Pipistrello—Pipistrello the wrestler, who jumped and leaped, and lifted an ox from the ground as easily as other men lift a child. No doubt to the wise it seems a fool's life, to the holy a life impure. But I had been born for it: no other was possible to me; and when money rained upon me, if I could ease an aching heart, or make a sick lad the stouter for a hearty meal, or make a tiny child the gladder for a lapful of copper coins, or give a poor stray dog a friend and a bed of straw, or a belabored mule a helpful push to the wheels of his cart,—well, that was all the good a mountebank could look to do in this world, and one could go to sleep easy upon it.

When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together, quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were burning.

One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see her—I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so.

I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there, the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own contrada. We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte—dull, old, gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart beat and my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead?

I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house—the gloomy barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass secchia filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.

When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my mother had grown old—old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and movement and mirth to me—then I knew that I had sinned against her with a mighty sin—a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She had been young still when I had left her—young and fair to look at, and without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time. And now—now she was quite old.

She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!" and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are like this.

When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray, firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except, indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said. I felt my throat choke.

It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna I had left: I could never make her again what she had been.

"It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain rather than with pride, for she hated my calling; but Orte was of another way of thinking. Orte flocked to see me, having heard of Pipistrello, its own Pipistrello, who had plagued it with his childish tricks, having grown into fame amongst the cities and villages as the strongest man in all Italy. For indeed I was that; and my mother, with dim, tear-laden eyes, looked at me and said, "You are the image of your father. Oh, my dear, my love! take care."

She, poor soul! saw nothing but the fall she had seen that day at Genoa of a strong man who dropped like a stone. But I fear to weary you. Well! I had left my spangled dress and all insignia of my calling with my comrades at the wine-shop, fearing to harass my mother by sight of all those things which would be so full of bitter recollection and dread to her. But Orte clamored for me to show it my powers—Orte, which was more than half asleep by Tiber's side, like that nymph Canens whom I used to read of in my Latin school-books—Orte, which had no earthly thing to do this long and lazy day in the drought of a rainless June.

I could not afford to baulk the popular will, and I was proud to show them all I could do—I, Pipistrello, whom they had cuffed and kicked so often in the old time for climbing their walnut trees and their pear trees, their house-roofs and their church-towers. So, when the day cooled I drew a circle with a red rope round myself and my men on a piece of waste ground outside the town, and all Orte flocked out there as the sun went down, shouting and cheering for me as though Pipistrello were a king or a hero. The populace is always thus—the giddiest-pated fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison—the same people that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte. To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears.

It was a rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it soon passes. I had drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight.

In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.

At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me, always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his head little Febo.

The mite whom we called Phoebus, because we had found him at sunrise and he had such yellow locks—yellow as the dandelion or the buttercup—was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia—a soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so, I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head our tiny Phoebus—all at once as I did this, which I had done a hundred times, and had always done in safety—all at once, amongst the sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand. She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowers above her left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.

I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.

There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down, tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena. I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him, his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.

People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phoebus, and bore him in my arms to my mother's house.

She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said, and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their sport. It was cruel."

I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him—the little fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like a king. Poor little dead Phoebus! It was true what my mother had said: the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so this night.

"Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me."

Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long I saw her face—a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair, like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome.

Little Phoebus was laid that night in my mother's house, with lilies about him, while a little candle that the moths flickered into burnt at his feet. As I sat and watched by him to drive away the rats which came up in hordes at night from Tiber into the rooms that overhung the river, I only saw that face. It had been a bad home-coming.

I would play no more in Orte, nor go with these men any more. I disbanded my troop and let them pass their own ways. I had coin enough to live on for months: that was enough for the present. I felt as if the sight of the red rope and the spangled vest and the watching crowd would be horrible to me—those things which I had loved so well. Little Phoebus was put away in the dark earth, as the little Etruscan children had been so many hundred years before him, and I buried his little crown and his little coat with him, as the Etruscans buried the playthings. Poor little man! we had taught him to make Death his toy, and his toy had been stronger than he.

After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went. The death of Phoebus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not Phoebus.

The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always with that single hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog without master or home.

One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my girella, which gave me a pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello, which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water, but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at me, laughed a little, and disappeared.

Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to cut the reeds.

Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloisa: about its walls there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell. The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its brakes counting by millions—sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river—built of stone, fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a living man that is blind.

This was and is Sant' Aloisa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and noisy with the clash and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of the Tiber—the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes, and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I have always felt afraid.

Sant' Aloisa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls, though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb.

The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth. They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields: flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the broad and open country—our women, who only breathe at their ease in the obscurity of their palco or under the shelter of a domino?

The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable, desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.

In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip. What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas—they who detest the sough of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of the passions?

This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phoebus, and yet I only lived to see her face again.

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.

My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one: the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast—not a steadfast, deep-rooted, well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife and a calling?"

Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed had I been like them—I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make up little knots of common flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of Phoebus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented to bide at home the child would be living."

Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me—But of that I said nothing. I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloisa. Once or twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count—a gray, shrunken, decrepit figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw—but of her, for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve. What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there: the fish came and went at their will for me.

One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net, I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloisa. There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.

The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of mezzo-vino. I looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to death with one hand.

These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at least of pleasant life—of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloisa was silent and empty.

Passing an open door, I saw her. She was sitting, doing nothing, in a room whose faded tapestries were gray as spiders' webs, and she was beautiful as only one woman is here and there in a generation. She looked at me, and I thought she smiled.

I went out with my brain on fire and my sight dim. I saw only that smile—that sudden, momentary smile whose fellow had brought death to little Phoebus. And I felt she had known me again, though she had seen me but once, in my spangled coat of velvet and silver, and now I had my legs bare to the knee, and was clad in a rough blue shirt and woollen jacket, like any other country-fellow upon Tiber's side.

As I was going out the serving-wench plucked my sleeve and whispered to me, "Come back a moment: she wishes to see you."

My heart leaped, then stood still. I turned back into the house, and with trembling knees went into that chamber where the dusky tapestry mouldered on the walls. She looked at me, sitting idly there herself in the bare, melancholy room—a woman with the face of our Titian's Venus.

"Did the child die?" she asked.

I stammered something, I knew not what.

"Why did you tremble that day?" she said, with the flicker of a smile about her lovely mouth: "you look strong—and bold."

How the words had courage and madness enough to leap to my lips I know not, but I do know I said to her, "You looked at me."

She frowned a moment: then she laughed. No doubt she had known it before. "Your nerves were not of iron, then, as they should be," she said carelessly. "Well! the people wanted to see something die. They always do: you must know that. Bring more fish for my husband to-morrow. Now go."

I trembled from head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to her face, and she still bade me return!

No doubt had I been a man well born I should have fallen at her feet and sworn a midsummer madness: I should have been emboldened to any coarse avowal, to any passionate effrontery. But I was only a stroller—a poor ignorant soul, half Hercules, half fool. I trembled and was mute.

When the air blew about me once more I felt as if I had been drunk—drunk on that sweet yeasty wine of a new vintage which makes the brain light and foolish. She had bade me return!

That day my mother ate alone at home. When night fell it found me by the Lagherello. I set my nets: I slept in a shepherd's hut. I had forgotten Phoebus: I only saw her face. What was she like? I cannot tell you. She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it—she who plays with the little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt, shut in by stone walls.

Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.

That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys.

The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my steps to Sant' Aloisa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your fish to Madama Flavia."

It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men—it had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome—but this old woman was all the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of pasta, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of Gentileo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.

"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.

Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in it—all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.

Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear such a name—a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose—a woman to kneel at morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.

"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it—she knew it very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I looked but a poor boor to her—a giant and a dolt.

She was leaning against a great old marble vase—leaning her hands on it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.

At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.

At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had said the ox in the yoke was strong or the Tiber strong at flood.

"Why are you a fisherman now?" she said. "Why do you leave your arena?"

I shuddered a little. "Since the child fell"—I muttered, thinking she would understand the remorse that made my old beloved calling horrible to me.

"It was no fault of yours," she said with a dreamy smile. "They say I have the evil eye—"

"You have, madama," I said bluntly, and then felt a choking in my throat, fearing my own rashness.

Her beautiful eyes had a bright scorn in them, and a cold mockery of me. "Why do you stay, then?" she asked, and smiled at the red carnations carelessly.

"Because—rather would I die of beholding you than live shut out from sight of you," I said in my madness. "Madama, I am a great useless fool: I have done nothing but leap and climb and make a show. I am big and strong as the oxen are, but they work, and I have never worked. I have shown myself, and the people have thrown me money—a silly life, good to no man or beast. Oh yes, that I know full well now; and I have killed Phoebus because you looked at me; and my mother, who has loved me all her life, is old before her time through my fault. I am a graceless fool, a mountebank. When I put off my spangles and stand thus, you see the rude peasant that I am. And yet in all the great, wide, crowded world I know there does not live another who could love you as I love—seeing you twice."

I stopped; the sound of my own voice frightened me; the dull tapestries upon the wall heaved and rocked round me. I saw her as through a mist, leaning there with both arms on the broken marble vase.

A momentary smile passed over her face. She seemed diverted, not angered as I feared. She had listened without protest. No doubt she knew it very well before I spoke. "You are very strong," she said at length. "Strong men are always feeble—somewhere. If the count Taddeo heard you he would—" Then some sudden fancy struck her, and she laughed aloud, her bright red lips all tremulous and convulsed with laughter. "What could he do? You could crush him with one hand, as you could crush a newt! Poor Taddeo! did he not beat your fish down, give you watered wine, the rinsings of the barrel, yesterday? That is Taddeo always."

She laughed again, but there was something so cruel in that laughter that it held me mute. I dared not speak to her. I stood there stupidly.

"Do you know that he is rich?" she said abruptly, gnawing with her lovely teeth the jagged leaf of one of her carnations. "Yes, he is rich, Taddeo. That is why my father sold me to him. Taddeo is rich: he has gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to Penna. And I am twenty-three years old, and I can read my own face in the mirror." She paused; her breast heaved, her beautiful low brows drew together in bitter fury at her fate: she had no thought of me.

I waited, mute. I did not dare to speak.

It was all true: she was the wife of Taddeo Marchioni, shut here as in a prison, with her youth passing and her loveliness unseen, and her angry soul consuming itself in its own fires. I loved her: what use was that to her—a man who had naught in all the world but the strength of his sinews and muscles?

She remembered me suddenly, and gave me a gesture of dismissal: "Take your fish to the woman; I cannot pay you for them; I have never as much as a bronze coin. But—you may come back another day. Bring more—bring more." Then with a more imperious gesture she made me leave her.

I stumbled out of the old dark, close-shuttered house into the burning brilliancy of the August day, giddy with passion and with hope. She knew I loved her, and yet she bade me return!

I know not how much, how little, that may mean in other lands, but here in Italy it has but one language—language enough to make a lover's heart leap like the wild goat. Yet hope is perhaps too great a word to measure rightly the timid joy that filled my breast. I lay in the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, they seemed alive.

A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant' Aloisa.

Christ! it was strange! I had led a rough life, I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena, as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. Now, all at once, the whole world seemed dead—dead heaven and earth—and only one woman's two eyes left living in the universe, living and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No? Ah, then you know not love.

All the night I lay awake—the short hot night when the western gold of sunset scarce fades into dark ere the east seems to glow luminous and transparent with the dawn. Ah! the sunrise! I shall see it once more, only once more! I shall see it through those bars, a hand's breadth of it above Tiber, no more; and when again it spreads its rosy warmth over the sky and reddens the river and the plain, I shall be dead—a headless thing pushed away under the earth and lime, and over my brain and skull the wise men will peer with knife and scalpel, and pour the plaster over its bones to take a cast, and say most likely to one another, as I heard them say once before a cast in a museum, "A good face, a fair brow, fine lines: strange that he should have been a murderer!" Well! so be it. Even though I lived for fourscore years and ten, the sun would nevermore rise for me as it rose before Phoebus died.

At that time I lived only to see a shadow on the barred windows, a hand open a lattice, a veiled head glide by through the moonbeams. I was wretched, yet never had I been so happy. The bolt of the gods stuns as it falls, but it intoxicates also.

I had been such a fool! such a fool! When she had said so much I had said nothing: that last moment haunted me with unending pain. If I had been bolder, if I had only known what to answer, if I had only seized her in my arms and kissed her! It would have been better to have had that one moment, and have died for it, than have been turned out of her presence like a poor cowardly clod.

I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. But to me this sickly summer was so fair that I continued to live in the absent shepherd's empty hut. I continued to net the fish when I could, and now and again I saw her. I lived only in the hope of seeing her face. She had the evil eye. Well, let it rest on me and bring me all woe, so that only I might live in its light one day! So I said in my madness, not knowing.

I must have looked mad at that time to the few scattered peasants about the pool. I lived on a handful of maize, a crust of bread. I cast my nets in the water, and once or twice went up to Sant' Aloisa with the small fish, and was sent away by the crone Marietta. August passed, and the time drew nigh for the gathering of the grapes, ripe here sooner than in the Lombard and the Tuscan plains. But the vintage of Sant' Aloisa was slight, for the ground was covered with olives in nearly every part. When they were stripping what few poor vines there were I offered myself for that work. I thought so I might behold her. There was no mirth on the lands of Taddeo Marchioni: the people were poor and dull. Fever that came from the river and the swamps had lessened their numbers by death and weakened those who were living: my strength was welcome to those ague-stricken creatures.

The day of the gathering was very hot: no rain had fallen. The oxen in the wains were merely skin and bone: their tongues were parched and swollen in their muzzled mouths. The grass had been long all burnt up, and the beasts famished: the air was stifling, pregnant with storm.

Amidst the sere and arid fields, and the woods, black and gray, of ilex and of olive, the great old square house rose before us, pale, solitary, mysterious—a mausoleum that shut in living creatures: it terrified me.

Night fell as the last wagon, loaded with the last casks of grapes, rolled slowly with heavy grinding wheels toward the cellars of Sant' Aloisa. With the wagon there were a few men enfeebled with fever, a few women shivering with ague. I walked behind the wagon, pushing it to aid the weary oxen. There was no moon: here and there a torch flickered in a copper sconce filled with oil. The courtyard and the cellar were of enormous size: in the old times Sant' Aloisa had sheltered fifteen hundred men. In the darkness, where a torch flared when he passed, I saw now and then Taddeo Marchioni coming and going, giving orders in his high, thin voice, screaming always, swearing sometimes, always suspecting some theft. He did not see me. He was entirely absorbed in his vintage and in the rebukes he hurled at his peasants. I drew back into the shadow, leaning against the column of the gateway, a huge wall blackened with time and damp. The bell of the old clock-tower sounded the nineteenth hour of the night. All at once the servant Marietta muttered in my ear, "Go in: she wants to speak with you. Go in to the tapestry-room on the other side of the house: you remember."

My blood bounded in my veins. I asked nothing better of Fate. I glided along the old walls, leaving the central court and the master there absorbed in his work, and I found with some difficulty the little side-door by which I had entered the house before. I trembled from head to foot, as in that hour. I felt myself all at once to be ugly, heavy, stupid, a brute to frighten any woman—sweating from the labors of the day, covered with dust, poor and frightful in my rough hempen shirt, with my naked legs and my bare knees impregnated with the juice of the grapes. And I dared to love this woman—I! Loved her, though she had slain Phoebus.

My mind was all in confusion: I was no longer master of myself. I scarcely drew breath; my head was giddy; I staggered as I went along those endless galleries and passages, as I had done that day when Phoebus had fallen on the sand of my arena. At last I reached—how I knew not—the room of the arazzi, scarcely lighted by a lamp of bronze that hung from the ceiling by a chain. In the twilight I saw the woman with the fatal gaze, with the lips of rose, with the features of Lucrezia, of Venus, the woman who in all ages has destroyed man.

Then I forgot that I was a laborer, a peasant, a juggler, a wrestler, a vagabond—that I was clad in coarse linen of hemp—that I was dirty and filthy and ignorant and coarse. I forgot myself: I only remembered my love—my love immense as the sky, omnipotent as Deity. I fell on my knees before her. I only cried with stifled voice, "I am yours! I am yours!" I did not even ask her to be mine. I was her slave, her tool, her servitor, her thing, to be cherished or rejected as she would. I shivered, I sobbed. I had never known before, it seemed to me, what love could be; and it made a madman of me.