of the sepulchre.

"But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the
child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on
their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the
sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:--

"'Here he sleeps.'

"'He,' even now, so long, long after, to the people of his birthplace.
Who can want more of life--or death?"

So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner that was as natural with
him in some moments as his buoyant and ironical gaiety at others.

Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and pulled down a knot of
pomegranate blossom for me, and we went together under the old walls,
across the maize fields, down the slope of the hills to the olive
orchard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches against the autumn
rains, had struck his mattock on the sepulchre of the Etruscan king.

There was only a little heap of fine dust when we reach the spot.

* * *

"There was so much more colour in those days," he had said, rolling a
big green papone before him with his foot. "If, indeed, it were laid on
sometimes too roughly. And then there was so much more play for
character. Now-a-days, if a man dare go out of the common ways to seek a
manner of life suited to him, and unlike others, he is voted a vagabond,
or, at least, a lunatic, supposing he is rich enough to get the sentence
so softened. In those days the impossible was possible--a paradox? oh,
of course. The perfection of those days was, that they were full of
paradoxes. No democracy will ever compass the immensity of Hope, the
vastness of Possibility, with which the Church of those ages filled the
lives of the poorest poor. Not hope spiritual only, but hope
terrestrial, hope material and substantial. A swineherd, glad to gnaw
the husks that his pigs left, might become the Viceregent of Christ, and
spurn emperors prostrate before his throne. The most famished student
who girt his lean loins to pass the gates of Pavia or Ravenna, knew that
if he bowed his head for the tonsure he might live to lift it in a
pontiff's arrogance in the mighty reality and the yet mightier metaphor
of a Canosa. The abuses of the mediaeval Church have been gibbeted in
every language; but I doubt if the wonderful absolute _equality_ which
that Church actually contained and caused has ever been sufficiently
remembered. Then only think how great it was to _be_