erable little lamb, newly born,
its long, soft legs tied together, its almost sightless, pale eyes
half-started from its sockets. As the humanist took it, it bleated with
sudden shrill strength, and Domenico could not help thinking of certain
images he had seen on monastery walls of the Good Shepherd carrying the
lame lamb on his shoulders. This was very different. For, with an odd
ferocity, Filarete placed the miserable young creature on the stone
before the fire, and slit its throat and chest with a long knife.

The god did not appear. They extinguished the lamps, left the carcase
of the lamb half charred in a pool of blood on the stone, and slowly
reascended into the daylight, leaving behind them, in the vaulted
chamber, a stifling fume of incense, of burnt flesh, and mingled damp.

Up above, among the ruins of the Christian church, where they had left
their mules, it was cold and sunny, and the light seemed curiously blue,
almost grey and dusty, after the yellow illumination below. Before them,
interrupted here and there by a mass of ruined masonry, or a few arches
of aqueduct, waved the grey-green, billowy plain, where the wind, which
rolled the great winter cloud-balls overhead, danced and sang with the
tall, dry hemlocks and sere white thistles, shining and rattling like
skeletons. And on to it seemed to descend cloud-mountains, vague
blueness and darkness--cloud or hill, you could not tell which--out of
whose flank, ever and anon, a sunbeam conjured up a visionary white
resplendent city.

The short winter day was beginning to draw in when they approached
silently the city walls, solemn with their towers and gates, endless
as it seemed, and enclosing, one felt vaguely, an endless, distant,
invisible city.

The sound of its bells came as from afar to meet the sacrilegious men.

VI

The culminating sacrilege was yet to come. The place that witnessed it
remains unchanged--a half-deserted church among the silent grass-grown
lanes, the crumbling convent walls, and ill-tended vineyards of the
Aventine; a hill that has retained in Christian times a look of its
sinister fame in Pagan ones. Among the cypresses, which seem to wander
up the hillside, rises the square belfry, among whose brickwork, flushed
in the sunset, are inlaid discs of porphyry torn from some temple
pavement, and plates of green majolica brought from the East, it is
said, by pilgrims or Crusaders. The arum-fringed lane widens before the
outer w