ksgivings,
or their entreaty. And he, with no aim of worship, yet somehow shocked
out of his unbelief by the very material influences around him.

Reuben's old wranglings and struggles with doubt had ended--where so
many are apt to end, when the world is sunny and success weaves its
silken meshes for the disport of self--in a quiet disbelief that angered
him no longer, because he had given over all fight with it. But the
great dome, flaming with its letters, _AEdificabo meam Ecclesiam_,
shining there for ages, kindled the fight anew. And strange as it may
seem, and perplexing as it was to the Doctor (when he received Reuben's
story of it), he came out from his first visit to the great Romish
temple with his religious nature more deeply stirred than it had been
for years.

_AEdificabo meam Ecclesiam._ _HE_ had uttered it. There was then
something to build,--something that had been built, at whose shrine
millions worshipped trustingly.

Under the sombre vaultings of the great Florentine Cathedral, the
impression was not weakened. The austere gloom of it chimed more nearly
with his state of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted
ceilings,--angels, saints, martyrs, holy families,--can art have been
leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not
somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling
by if they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the meretricious
adornments of the churches of Genoa afford new evidence of the way in
which the heart of a people has lavished itself upon belief; and if
belief, why, then, hope.

Upon the Cornice road, with Italy behind him and home before (such home
as he knows), he thinks once more of those he has left. Not that he has
forgotten them altogether; he has purchased a rich coral necklace in
Naples, which will be the very thing for his old friend Rose; and, in
Rome, the richest cameos to be found in the Via Condotti he has secured
for Adele; even for Aunt Eliza he has brought away from Florence a bit
of the _pietra dura_, a few olive-leaves upon a black ground. Nor has he
forgotten a rich piece of the Genoese velvet for Mrs. Brindlock; and,
for his father, an old missal, which, he trusts, dates back far enough
to save it from the odium he attaches to the present Church, and to give
it an early Christian sanctity. He has counted upon seeing Mr. Maverick
at Marseilles, but learns, with surprise, upon his arrival there, that
this