t
flinty couch soft to the holy sufferer as a bed of down. His limbs were
clothed in a garb of horsehair of the coarsest fabric; his drink was the
dank drops that oozed from the porous walls of his cell; and his
sustenance, such morsels as were bestowed upon him by the poor--the only
strangers permitted to approach him. No fire was suffered, where
perpetual winter reigned. None were admitted to his nightly vigils;
none witnessed any act of penance; nor were any groans heard to issue
from that dreary cave; but the knotted, blood-stained thong, discovered
near his couch, too plainly betrayed in what manner those long lone
nights were spent. Thus did a year roll on. Traces of his sufferings
were visible in his failing strength. He could scarcely crawl; but he
meekly declined assistance. He appeared not, as had been his wont, at
the midnight mass; the door of his cell was thrown open at that hour;
the light streamed down like a glory upon his reverend head; he heard
the distant reverberations of the deep _Miserere_; and breathed odors as
if wafted from Paradise.

One morn it chanced that they who sought his cell found him with his
head upon his bosom, kneeling before the image of the virgin patroness
of his shrine. Fearing to disturb his devotions, they stood reverently
looking on; and thus silently did they tarry for an hour; but, as in
that space he had shown no signs of motion, fearing the worst, they
ventured to approach him. He was cold as the marble before which he
knelt. In the act of humblest intercession--it may be, in the hope of
grace--had Cyprian's spirit fled.

"Blessed are they who die in the Lord," exclaimed his brethren,
regarding his remains with deepest awe. On being touched, the body fell
to the ground. It was little more than a skeleton.

Under the cloisters of the holy pile were his bones interred, with a
degree of pomp and ostentation that little accorded with the lowliness
and self-abasement of this man of many sorrows.

This chapel, at the time of which we treat, was pretty much in the same
condition as it existed in the days of its holy inmate. Hewn out of the
entrails of the rock, the roof, the vaults, the floor, were of solid
granite. Three huge cylindrical pillars, carved out of the native rock,
rough as the stems of gnarled oak-trees, lent support to the ceiling.
Support, however, was unneeded; an earthquake would scarce have shaken
down those solid rafters. Only in one corner, where the wat