cheese, and a sweet omelette. We
both agreed that we had had a most excellent breakfast. The coffee left
a good deal to be desired, and there was no champagne on the list fit to
drink; but both these faults could be remedied by the morrow, and were
remedied.

We spent the rest of the day wandering between the seashore and the
pine-clad hills. The next morning I put in some work, but in the
afternoon I was free to walk and explore. On one of my first tramps I
discovered a monastery among the hills hundreds of feet above the sea,
built and governed by an Italian monk. I got to know the Pere
Vergile[27] and had a great talk with him. He was both wise and strong,
with ingratiating, gentle manners. Had he gone as a boy from his little
Italian fishing village to New York or Paris, he would have certainly
come to greatness and honour. One afternoon I took Oscar to see him: the
monastery was not more than three-quarters of an hour's stroll from our
hotel; but Oscar grumbled at the walk as a nuisance, said it was miles
and miles; the road, too, was rough, and the sun hot. The truth was, he
was abnormally lazy. But he fascinated the Italian with his courteous
manner and vivid speech, and as soon as we were alone the Abbe asked me
who he was.

"He must be a great man," he said, "he has the stamp of a great man, and
he must have lived in courts: he has the charming, graceful, smiling
courtesy of the great."

"Yes," I nodded mysteriously, "a great man--incognito."

The Abbe kept us to dinner, made us taste of his oldest wines, and a
special liqueur of his own distilling; told us how he had built the
monastery with no money, and when we exclaimed with wonder, reproved us
gently:

"All great things are built with faith, and not with money; why wonder
that this little building stands firmly on that everlasting
foundation?"

When we came out of the monastery it was already night, and the
moonlight was throwing fantastic leafy shadows on the path, as we walked
down through the avenue of forest to the sea shore.

"You remember those words of Vergil, Frank--_per amica silentia
lunae_--they always seem to me indescribably beautiful; the most magic
line about the moon ever written, except Browning's in the poem in which
he mentioned Keats--'him even.' I love that 'amica silentia.' What a
beautiful nature the man had who could feel 'the _friendly_ silences of
the moon.'"

When we got down the hill he declared himself tired.

"Ti