of minor singers. The
mighty verse swept Odo out to open seas of thought, and from his vision
of that earlier Italy, hapless, bleeding, but alive and breast to breast
with the foe, he drew the presage of his country's resurrection.

Passing from this high music to the company of Gamba and his friends was
like leaving a church where the penitential psalms are being sung for
the market-place where mud and eggs are flying. The change was not
agreeable to a fastidious taste; but, as Gamba said, you cannot clean
out a stable by waving incense over it. After some hesitation, he had
agreed to make Odo acquainted with those who, like himself, were
secretly working in the cause of progress. These were mostly of the
middle class, physicians, lawyers, and such men of letters as could
subsist on the scant wants of an unliterary town. Ablest among them was
the bookseller, Andreoni, whose shop was the meeting place of all the
literati of Pianura. Andreoni, famous throughout Italy for his editions
of the classics, was a man of liberal views and considerable learning,
and in his private room were to be found many prohibited volumes, such
as Beccaria's Crime and Punishment, Gravina's Hydra Mystica, Concini's
History of Probabilism and the Amsterdam editions of the French
philosophical works.

The reformers met at various places, and their meetings were conducted
with as much secrecy as those of the Honey-Bees. Odo was at first
surprised that they should admit him to their conferences; but he soon
divined that the gatherings he attended were not those at which the
private designs of the party were discussed. It was plain that they
belonged to some kind of secret association; and before he had been long
in Pianura he learned that the society of the Illuminati, that bugbear
of priests and princes, was supposed to have agents at work in the
duchy. Odo had heard little of this execrated league, but that it was
said to preach atheism, tyrannicide and the complete abolition of
territorial rights; but this, being the report of the enemy, was to be
received with a measure of doubt. He tried to learn from Gamba whether
the Illuminati had a lodge in the city; but on this point he could
extract no information. Meanwhile he listened with interest to
discussions on taxation, irrigation, and such economic problems as might
safely be aired in his presence.

These talks brought vividly before him the political corruption of the
state and the misery o