impossible to be downhearted, and as the brave, hopeful
words fell from him, I that had been not a little in the dumps grew
blithe to whistling-point--not that I did whistle, of course, seeing
that such an ebullition of high spirits would be something out of place
on a night march toward an enemy's country, and scarcely to be commended
by your strategists. Some may say, when they learn the leave of my tale,
that it makes an ironic commentary on Messer Dante's speech and Messer
Dante's conviction, to learn, after all, that what saved us from the
destruction that was spread for our feet was no more and no other than
the craft of a woman and a light o' love. But me-thinks the answer to
that is, that the instruments whereby it may please Heaven to work out
its purposes are not of our choosing, but of Heaven's; and those that
cavil may recall, to their own abashment, how one that was of the same
way of life as our Vittoria was permitted by celestial grace to be a
minister unto holiness. I will not venture to say that Monna Vittoria
did that which she did do with any very conscious thought of serving
Heaven. Nay, more, I am very sure that, as far as she knew, her main
purpose was to serve herself; but it is the result we must look to in
such instances as these. After all, the Sybil, when she uttered her
words of wisdom to all Greece, was as ignorant of what she communicated
as a jug is of the liquor it contains, and yet what a mighty service the
jug renders to your true toper!

Now, while we thus wiled away the journey in such profitable
conversation, the tide of the night had turned, the glory of the summer
stars had paled and faded and departed from the lightening skies. Behind
the hills dawn, in its cloak of unearthly colors, was beginning to fill
the cup of heaven, and the multitude of small birds, waking from their
slumbers, unwinged their heads and started to utter their matins like
honest choristers. The world that had been all black and silver, like
the panoply on a knightly catafalque, was now flooded with a gray
clearness in which all things showed strange, as if one dreamed of them
rather than saw them. Below and beyond us lay a great stretch of wooded
land, and here it was that we knew we were to meet our reinforcement;
here we realized that from this point the adventure might veritably be
said to begin. Our spirits rose with the rising day to the blithest
altitudes; already we seemed to savor the taste of brisk ca