t. The pigeons, whirling round in many circles (the
sunlight flashing upon their burnished breasts, and upon the soft gray
and purple feathers of their wings), gradually--in little groups of
twos and threes--flew down, and finally settled themselves in a knot
upon the pavement, to peck up the corn.

"Good, pious old man, how I honor you!" ejaculated Count Marescotti,
fervently, as he watched the timid gray-coated pigeons gathering
round the cavaliere's feet, as he stood apart from the rest, serenely
smiling as he fed them. "May thy placid spirit be unruffled in time
and in eternity!"

The interior of the church, in the Longobardic style, is bare almost
to plainness. On entering, the eye ranges through a long broad nave
with rounded arches, the arches surmounted by narrow windows; these
dividing arches, supported on single columns with monumental capitals,
forming two dark and rather narrow aisles. The high altar is raised on
three broad steps. Here burn a few lights, dimmed into solitary specks
by the brightness of the sun. The walls on either side of the aisles
are broken by various chapels. These lie in deep shadow. The roof,
formed of open rafters, bearing marks of having once been elaborately
gilded, is now but a mass of blackened timbers. The floor is of brick,
save where oft-recurring sepulchral slabs are cut into the surface.
These slabs, of black-and-white marble, or of alabaster stained
and worn from its native whiteness into a dingy brown, are almost
obliterated by the many footsteps which have come and gone upon them
for so many centuries. Not a single name remains to record whom they
commemorate. Dimly seen under a covering of dirt and dust deposited by
the living, lie the records of these unknown dead: here a black lion
rampant on a white shield; there a coat-of-arms on an escutcheon, with
the fragment of a princely coronet; beyond, a life-sized monk, his
shadowy head resting on a cushion--a matron with her robes soberly
gathered about her feet, her hands crossed on her bosom--a bishop,
under a painted canopy, mitre on head and staff in hand--a warrior,
grimly helmeted, carrying his drawn sword in his hand. Who are these?
Whence came they? None can tell.

Beside one of the most worn and defaced of these slabs the cavaliere
stopped.

"On this stone," he said, his smiling countenance suddenly grown
solemn--"on this very stone, where you see the remains of a
mosaic"--and he pointed to some morsels of colo