spirits to most persons, to young Gerald, trained in all the asceticism
of a convent, it was a perfect paradise. The wild and far-spreading
landscape imparted a glorious sense of liberty, which grew with each
day's enjoyment of it. It was a land of mountain and forest--those deep,
dark woods of chestnut-trees traversed with the clear and rapid rivulets
so common in the Roman States, with here and there, at rare intervals,
the solitary hut of a charcoal-burner. In these vast solitudes, silent
as the great savannahs of the South, he passed his days--now roaming in
search of game, now dreamily lying, book in hand, beside a river's bank,
or strolling listlessly along, tasting, in the very waywardness of
an untrammelled will, an ecstasy only known to those who have felt
captivity.

Though there were several young people in the family of the Intendente,
Gerald had no companionship with any of them: the boys were boorish,
uneducated, and coarse-minded, and the girls, with one exception, were
little better. Ninetta, it is true, was gentler; her voice was soft,
and her silky hair and soft, dark eyes had a strange, subduing influence
about them; but even she was far from that ideal his imagination had
pictured, nor could he, by all his persuasions, induce her to share his
raptures for Ariosto, or the still more passionate delight that Petrarch
gave him. He was just opening that period of youth when the heart yearns
for some object of affection--some centre around which its own hopes and
fears, its wishes and aspirations, may revolve. It is wonderful how much
imagination contributes in such cases, supplying graces and attractions
where nature has been a niggard, and giving to the veriest commonplace
character traits of distinctive charm.

Ninetta was quite pretty enough for all this, but she was no more.
Without a particle of education, she had never raised her mind beyond
the commonest daily cares; and what with the vines, the olives, the
chestnuts, the festivals of the church, and little family gatherings,
her life had its sphere of duties so full as to leave no time for the
love-sick wanderings of an idle boy.

If she was disposed to admire him when, in fits of wild energy, he would
pass nights and days in chase of the wild boar, or follow the track of
a wolf, with the steadfast tenacity of a hound, she cared little for
his intervals of dreamy fancy, nor lent any sympathy to joys or sorrows
which had no basis in reality; and