r some hours longer. It is my
frequent custom to keep vigils,--and sometimes the thought occurs to me
whether it were not better to keep them in yonder convent, the bell of
which just now seemed to summon me. Should I do wisely, do you think, to
exchange this old tower for a cell?"

"What! Turn monk?" exclaimed his friend. "A horrible idea!"

"True," said Donatello, sighing. "Therefore, if at all, I purpose doing
it."

"Then think of it no more, for Heaven's sake!" cried the sculptor.
"There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being
miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I
question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and
spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their sensual
physiognomies, which meet me at every turn--is inevitably a beast! Their
souls, if they have any to begin with, perish out of them, before their
sluggish, swinish existence is half done. Better, a million times, to
stand star-gazing on these airy battlements, than to smother your new
germ of a higher life in a monkish cell!"

"You make me tremble," said Donatello, "by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God's service!"

"They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish," replied Kenyon. "Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my own
part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to mankind
my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace in it."

"Ah, but you are a heretic!" said the Count.

Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor's remembrance went back to that scene in the
Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had seemed
identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance; for now,
when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his
fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced,
came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths the Faun had
found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the light of heaven.

The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello's face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more