presentative of the Almighty, the living voice of
God, the infallible one. The sunless chapel, the white and crimson
vestments, the fisherman's ring, the vast crowd in the blazing light of
the piazza, the sudden silence, and the clear cry of the Cardinal Deacon
ringing out under the blue sky, "I announce to you joyful tidings--the
Most Eminent and Reverend Cardinal Leone, having taken the name of Pius
X., is elected Pope." Then the call of silver trumpets, the roar of ten
thousand human throats, the surging mass of living men below the
balcony, and the joy-bells ringing out the glad news from every church
tower in Rome, that a new King and Pontiff had been given by God to His
World.

Somewhere in the dark hours the Pope dozed off, and then Sleep, the
maker of visions, dispelled his dream. Another picture--a picture which
had pursued him at intervals both in sleeping and waking hours, ever
since the great day when he stepped out on to the balcony and was
saluted as a god--came to him again that night. He called it his
presentiment. The scene was always the same. A darkened room, a chapel,
an altar, himself on his knees, with the sense of Someone bending over
him, and an awful voice saying into his ears:--"You, the Vicar of Jesus
Christ; you, the rock on which the Saviour built His Church; you, the
living voice of God; you, the infallible one; you, who fill the most
exalted dignity on earth--_remember you are but clay_!"

The Pope awoke with a start, and to break the oppression of painful
thoughts he turned on the light, propped himself up in bed, and taking a
book from the night table, he began to read. It was the Catholic legend
of a father doomed to destroy his son, or suffer the son to destroy the
father. They had been separated early in the son's life, and now that
they met again they met as foes, and the son drew his sword upon his
father without knowing who he was!

One by one the incidents of the history linked themselves with the
incidents of the day before, and the lonely old man of the
Vatican--childless, kinless, homeless for all his state, and cut off
from every human tie--began to think of things that were still farther
back than the conclave and the proclamation--things of the dead past
which nature had seemed to bury with so kind a hand, covering the grave
with grass and flowers.

A sweet young face, timid and trustful; a sudden shock such as makes the
world crumble beneath a man's feet; a vague sense