nd to the
performance of my religious duties; and time brought me resignation and
cheerfullness.

"From that day to this, Duke of Hereward, I have never once seen your
name printed or written, and never once heard it breathed. You may have
passed away from earth, for aught I know to the contrary; though I hope
and believe that you have not.

"My boy throve finely. The good priest of Santa Maria took charge of his
education for the first twelve years of the pupil's life, made of him,
even at that early age, a good Latin and Greek scholar, and a fair
mathematician; and would have prepared him to enter one of the German
Universities, had not the summons come that cut short the good father's
work on earth, and carried him to his eternal home.

"It was soon after the loss of this kind friend, who had been the strong
prop of my weakness, the wise counsellor of my ignorance, that my own
health began to fail. The seeds of pulmonary consumption, inherited from
my mother, began to develop, and nothing could arrest their progress. For
the last three years I have been an invalid, growing worse and worse
every year. Perhaps in no other climate, under no other treatment, could
I have lived so long as I have been permitted to live here by the help of
the pure air and the grape cure.

"My boy, now fifteen years of age, is everything that I could wish him to
be, except in one respect. He will not consent to enter the church. He
wants to be a soldier, poor lad! Well, we cannot coerce him into a life
of sanctity and self-denial. Such a life must always be a voluntary
sacrifice. Neither do I wish to cross him, now that I am on my death-bed
and doomed so soon to leave him.

"In these last days on earth, lying on my dying bed, travailing for his
good, it has come to me like an inspiration that I must send him to his
father. I must not leave him friendless in the world. And now that the
priest Antonio has long passed away, and I am so soon to follow, he will
have no friends except these poor, helpless Italian peasants among whom
he has been reared. Therefore I must send him, in the hope that you will
recognize him by his exact likeness to yourself, and prove his identity
as your son, by all the testimony you can be sure to gather in Paris and
at San Vito. I have written this long letter, in the intervals between
pain and fever, during the last few weeks.

"Yesterday, my faithful physician warned me that my days on earth had
dwindled do