hought Felix, "or is he only
inwardly miserable?"

CHAPTER VI.

The artist whose feelings of brotherly affection were deeply hurt, and
who felt the happy expectations which he had formed of this meeting
bitterly disappointed, hurried away at a rapid pace. The Priest looked
after his brother with a sad dark expression, then sat down on a stone
near the roadside and contemplated thoughtfully the deep waters of the
river in which the dark firs of the Koenigstuhl were now reflected. The
flow of the water recalled to him the troubled waves of that Canal, in
the which for so many years of his college life at Venice, he had
gazed, and he thought of the sad morning when he found himself
transposed from the small palace in the ever verdant garden in the
Chiaia and the blooming orange groves of Naples, to the moist damp
walks of the Jesuit college at Venice. Instead of the view over the
gulf which sparkled with the coloring of the opal or emerald, he saw
with horror the brown slime of the Laguna, His eye accustomed to range
from the ridgy peaks of Capri to the noble lines of Vesuvius, now saw
on the other side of the dirty ditch, a bare wall without windows from
which water dropped down. Accustomed during his hours of recreation to
play in the garden with his sister, watched over by the loving eye of a
mother, he now found himself surrounded by about fifty boys, who looked
as pale and strange as himself, who "for recreation" turned out in a
long gloomy corridor, or were taken for an evening walk to the Lido, he
at the tail of a long string of companions under the care of a teacher,
not allowed to look to the right or left to see the beauty of the proud
Venice. At first he thought that he should die in this world without
light or mother's love. He had wept during the night time and spent the
day in fruitless home sickness. His only occupation was, to pray in
silence, as he had been told that it was in his power, to free the
souls of his mother and sister from purgatory, and when he felt a
melancholy resignation in his captivity, this was caused by the fact
that every day which he spent in a convent, gave him ten days
remission, which he could pass on to them. Then he became quick of
perception in the hours of study, so as to understand the teacher more
rapidly than the others and to render more surely and more clearly the
subject learnt. The teachers themselves had repeatedly reasserted that