for the new field, six hundred miles
distant. They had a regular cavalcade of carriages and horsemen, for
Colonna was a very rich man and everything was his for the asking. They
traveled by a circuitous route, so as to visit many schools, monasteries
and towns on the way. Everywhere honors were paid them.

The change of scene, meeting so many new people, and the excitement of
making public addresses, revived the spirits of Petrarch. Slowly the
intensity of his passion subsided. He began to think of something else
beside his lady-love.

Petrarch kept a journal of his trip, which has been preserved for us in
the form of letters. At one place on the route a most tragic
circumstance came to his notice. It affected him so much that he wrote
it out with many sorrowful comments. It seems a certain monk of decided
literary and musical ability was employed by a nobleman to give
music-lessons to his daughters. The inevitable happened.

Petrarch said it did not--that the monk was wrongfully accused. Anyway,
the father of the girl, who was the magistrate of the district, ordered
the monk to be sealed up in a cell and to remain there the rest of his
life. The girl was sent to a nunnery, and the monk in a few weeks
succeeded in killing himself, and his cell became his grave. This kind
of punishment, carried out by the judge, who according to our ideas had
no right to try the case, reveals the kind of "justice" that existed
only a few hundred years ago.

The barbarity of the sentence came close home to Petrarch, and both he
and the young bishop tell what they think of the Christianity that
places a penalty on natural affection.

So they hastened away from the monastery where had lived the monk whose
love cost him his life, on to their own field of labor.

Here Petrarch remained for two years. His health and spirits came back,
but poetry had gone by the board. In Lombes there was no one who cared
for poetry.

Petrarch congratulated himself on having mastered his passion. Laura had
become but a speck on the distant horizon, a passing incident of his
youth. But he sighed for Avignon. There was life and animation, music,
literature, art, oratory and the society of great men. Besides he wanted
to prove to his own satisfaction that he had mastered his love for
Laura.

He would go back to Avignon.

He went back; he saw Laura; she saw him, and passing him with a swift
glance of recognition moved on. At sight of her his knees becam