out alone. I leave you today, and charge you not to
seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watch and
wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone. Before many days
I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength."

That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in their
orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of a very
different description surrounded the Father Francesco.

One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchanting
region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on earth a
more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it to him,
that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary region which
might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.

Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas garlanded with
roses and flushing with grapes whose juice gains warmth from the breathing
of its subterraneous fires, while just above them rises a region more
awful than can be created by the action of any common causes of sterility.
There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so
peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one
enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural.
On all sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their
immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their
fiery agonies, they had struggled and wreathed and knotted together, and
then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs of those terrific
convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the
hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene.
The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is
ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life,--of goblin convulsions
and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps
have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the
rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,--as if
its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact
revealed it.

The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,--with its
enchanted islands, its jewelled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked
and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and
shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of pe