ew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in
what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the
sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a
white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed
the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward,
and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in
my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.

I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a
county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure
enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like
any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his
contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a
skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all
the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the
farmer's harrow.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded
back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who w