s
snow and almost as translucent in their extraordinary frailty. I became
increasingly conscious, too, of the great weakness of my body and the
great lassitude that filled me.

"Have I had the fever?" I asked him presently.

"Ay, my son. And who would not? Blessed Virgin! who would not after what
you underwent?"

And now he poured into my astonished ears the amazing story that had
overrun the country-side. It would seem that my cry in the night, my
exultant cry to Satan that I had defeated him, had been overheard by
a goatherd who guarded his flock in the hills. In the stillness he
distinctly heard the words that I had uttered, and he came trembling
down, drawn by a sort of pious curiosity to the spot whence it had
seemed to him that the cry had proceeded.

And there by a pool of the Bagnanza he had found me lying prone, my
white body glistening like marble and almost as cold. Recognizing in me
the anchorite of Monte Orsaro, he had taken me up in his strong arms
and had carried me back to my hut. There he had set about reviving me by
friction and by forcing between my teeth some of the grape-spirit that
he carried in a gourd.

Finding that I lived, but that he could not arouse me and that my icy
coldness was succeeded by the fire of fever, he had covered me with my
habit and his own cloak, and had gone down to Casi to fetch the priest
and relate his story.

This story was no less than that the hermit of Monte Orsaro had been
fighting with the devil, who had dragged him naked from his hut and had
sought to hurl him into the torrent; but that on the very edge of
the river the anchorite had found strength, by the grace of God, to
overthrow the tormentor and to render him powerless; and in proof of
it there was my body all covered with Satan's claw-marks by which I had
been torn most cruelly.

The priest had come at once, bringing with him such restoratives as he
needed, and it is a thousand mercies that he did not bring a leech, or
else I might have been bled of the last drops remaining in my shrunken
veins.

And meanwhile the goatherd's story had gone abroad. By morning it was on
the lips of all the country-side, so that explanations were not lacking
to account for St. Sebastian's refusal to perform the usual miracle, and
no miracle was expected--nor had the image yielded any.

The priest was mistaken. A miracle there had been. But for what had
chanced, the multitude must have come again confidently expecting