ide-awake, my
pulses throbbing, my imagination all on fire. I sat up and listened
with an enthralled attention, unconscious of everything and everybody,
unconscious even of the very voice of the reader, intent only upon the
amazing, tragic matter that he read.

For it happened that this was the Fourth Book of the Aeneid, and the
most lamentable, heartrending story of Dido's love for Aeneas, of his
desertion of her, of her grief and death upon the funeral pyre.

It held me spellbound. It was more real then anything that I had ever
read or heard; and the fate of Dido moved me as if I had known and loved
her; so that long ere Messer Caro came to an end I was weeping freely in
a most exquisite misery.

Thereafter I was as one who has tasted strong wine and finds his thirst
fired by it. Within a week I had read the Aeneid through, and was
reading it a second time. Then came the Comedies of Terence, the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, Martial, and the Satires of Juvenal. And
with those my transformation was complete. No longer could I find
satisfaction in the writings of the fathers of the church, or in
contemplating the lives of the saints, after the pageantries which the
eyes of my soul had looked upon in the profane authors.

What instructions my mother supposed Fifanti to have received concerning
me from Arcolano, I cannot think. But certain it is that she could never
have dreamed under what influences I was so soon to come, no more than
she could conceive what havoc they played with all that hitherto I had
learnt and with the resolutions that I had formed--and that she had
formed for me--concerning the future.

All this reading perturbed me very oddly, as one is perturbed who having
long dwelt in darkness is suddenly brought into the sunlight and dazzled
by it, so that, grown conscious of his sight, he is more effectively
blinded than he was before. For the process that should have been a
gradual one from tender years was carried through in what amounted to
little more than a few weeks.

My Lord Gambara took an odd interest in me. He was something of
a philosopher in his trivial way; something of a student of his
fellow-man; and he looked upon me as an odd human growth that was being
subjected to an unusual experiment. I think he took a certain delight in
helping that experiment forward; and certain it is that he had more to
do with the debauching of my mind than any other, or than any reading
that I did.

It was not tha