the temples we rear and mean to dedicate
to our highest and holiest aspirations made homes for most worldly
passions! And what a strange chaos did that poor boy's mind soon become!
for now he read whole days, and almost whole nights long, hurrying from
his meals back to that lonely chamber, where he loved to be. With
the insatiable thirst for new acquirement he tasted of all about him:
dramatists, historians, essay-writers, theologians; the wildest theories
of the rights of man, the most uncompromising asserters of divine
authority for royalty, the sufferings and sorrows of noble-hearted
missionaries, the licentious lives of courtly debauchees--all poured in
like a strong flood over the soil of his mind, enriching, corrupting,
ennobling, and debasing it by turns. Like some great edifice reared
without plan, his mind displayed the strangest and most opposite
combinations, and thus the noble eloquence of Massillon, the wit of
Moliere, the epigrammatic pungency of Pascal, blended themselves with
the caustic severity of Voltaire, the touching pathos of Rousseau, and
the knowledge of life so eminently the gift of Le Sage. To see that
world of which these great men presented such a picture, became now his
all-absorbing passion. To mingle with his fellow-men as actor, and not
spectator. To be one of that immense _dramatis persono_ who moved about
the stage of life, seemed enough for all ambition. The strong spirit of
adventure lay deeply in his heart, and he felt a kind of pride to think
that if any future success was to greet him, he could recall the days
at the Tana, and say, there never was one who started in life poorer or
more friendless.

There was no exaggeration in this. His clothes were rags, his shoes
barely held together, and the only covering he had for his head was the
little skullcap he used to wear in school hours. Even old Pippo began
to scoff at his miserable appearance, and hinted a hope, that before the
season of the contraband begun Gerald would have taken his departure, or
be able to make a more respectable figure. As Gabriel had now been gone
many weeks, and no tidings whatever come of him, the old man's reserve
and deference daily decreased. He grumbled at Gerald's habits of study,
profitless and idle as they seemed to him, while there was many a thing
to be done about the house and the garden. He was not weak or sickly
now: he could help to chop the wood for winter firing; he could raise
those heavy wa