"You will stay," cried Wilhelm, "if only for the sake of the young lady,
to whom you still feel kindly." Belotti shook his head, and answered
quietly:

"You can add nothing, young sir, to what the holy Father represented
to me yesterday. But my mind is made up, I shall go; yet as I value the
holy Father's good opinion and yours, I beg you to do me the favor to
listen to me. I have passed my sixty-second birthday, and an old horse
or an old servant stands a long time in the market-place before any
one will buy them. There might probably be a place in Brussels for a
Catholic steward, who understands his business, but this old heart longs
to return to Naples--ardently, ardently, unutterably. You have seen our
blue sea and our sky, young sir, and I yearn for them, but even more for
other, smaller things. It now seems a joy that I can speak in my native
language to you, Herr Wilhelm, and you, holy Father. But there is a
country where every one uses the same tongue that I do. There is a
little village at the foot of Vesuvius--merciful Heavens! Many a person
would be afraid to stay there, even half an hour, when the mountain
quakes, the ashes fall in showers, and the glowing lava pours out in
a stream. The houses there are by no means so well built, and the
window-panes are not so clean as in this country. I almost fear that
there are few glass windows in Resina, but the children don't freeze,
any more than they do here. What would a Leyden house-keeper say to our
village streets? Poles with vines, boughs of fig-trees, and all sorts
of under-clothing on the roofs, at the windows, and the crooked, sloping
balconies; orange and lemon-trees with golden fruit grow in the little
gardens, which have neither straight paths nor symmetrical beds.
Everything there grows together topsy-turvy. The boys, who in rags that
no tailor has darned or mended, clamber over the white vineyard walls,
the little girls, whose mothers comb their hair before the doors of the
houses, are not so pink and white, nor so nicely washed as the Holland
children, but I should like to see again the brown-skinned, black-haired
little ones with the dark eyes, and end my days amid all the clatter in
the warm air, among my nephews, nieces and blood-relations."

As he uttered these words, the old man's features had flushed and
his black eyes sparkled with a fire, that but a short time before
the northern air and his long years of servitude seemed to have
extinguished