ld go tinkling down the rough path behind him, and
sometimes it seemed as if the whole loose black mass from above were about
to slide, like an avalanche, down upon his head;--he almost hoped it
would. Sometimes he would stop, overcome by the toil of the ascent, and
seat himself for a moment on a black fragment, and then his eye would
wander over the wide and peaceful panorama below. He seemed to himself
like a fly perched upon some little roughness of a perpendicular wall, and
felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in being thus between earth and
heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty, and peacefulness would steal over
him, as if he were indeed something disfranchised and disembodied, a part
of the harmonious and beautiful world that lay stretched out beneath him;
in a moment more he would waken himself with a start, and resume his
toilsome journey with a sullen and dogged perseverance.

At last he gained the top of the mountain,--that weird, strange region
where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was no honest
foodful mother earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosive minerals.
Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were in all he touched,
every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam, while rolling clouds
of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming, like the roar of an
immense furnace, told his nearness to the great crater. He penetrated the
sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very brink of a huge basin, formed by
a wall of rocks around a sunken plain, the midst of which rose the black
cone of the subterraneous furnace, which crackled and roared and from time
to time spit up burning stones and cinders or oozed out slow ropy streams
of liquid fire.

The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of brown and
orange by the admixture of various ores, but their brightness seemed
strange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of vapor, now enveloping
the whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this spot and now in that, seemed
to magnify the dismal pit to an indefinite size. Now and then there would
come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort of convulsed sob of
hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath his feet, and fragments
from the surrounding rocks would scale off and fall with crashing
reverberations into the depth beneath; at such moments it would seem as if
the very mountain were about to crush in and bear him down in its ruins.

Father Francesco, thoug