ad watched them in former days on
the Appian Way, round the tomb of Caecilia Metella--their playground for
two thousand years; now I found them dancing the selfsame dance in the
land of St. Catherine and of Pia de' Tolomei, at the gates of Sienna,
that most melancholy and most fascinating of cities. All along my path
they quivered in the bents and brushwood, chasing one another, and ever
and anon, at the call of desire, tracing above the roadway the fiery
arch of their darting flight.

On the white ribbon of the road, in these clear Spring nights, the only
person I used to encounter was the Reverend Father Adone Doni, who at
the time was, like myself, working in the old Academy _degli Intronati_.
I had taken an instant liking for the Cordelier in question, a man who,
grown grey in study, still preserved the cheerful, facile humour of a
simple, unlettered countryman. He was very willing to converse; and I
greatly relished his bland speech, his cultivated yet artless way of
thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal font, the play
of his passions at once keen and refined, the strange, alluring
personality that informed the whole man. Assiduous at the library, he
was also a frequent visitor to the marketplace, halting for choice in
front of the peasant girls who sell oranges, and listening to their
unconventional remarks. He was learning, he would say, from their lips
the true _Lingua Toscana_.

All I knew of his past life, about which he never spoke, was that he was
born at Viterbo, of a noble but miserably impoverished family, that he
had studied the humanities and theology at Rome, as a young man had
joined the Franciscans of Assisi, where he worked at the Archives, and
had had difficulties on questions of faith with his ecclesiastical
superiors. Indeed I thought I noticed myself a tendency in the Father
towards peculiar views. He was a man of religion and a man of science,
but not without certain eccentricities under either aspect. He believed
in God on the evidence of Holy Scripture and in accordance with the
teachings of the Church, and laughed at those simple philosophers who
believed in Him on their own account, without being under any obligation
to do so. So far he was well within the bounds of orthodoxy; it was in
connection with the Devil that he professed peculiar opinions. He held
the Devil to be wicked, but not absolutely wicked, and considered that
the fiend's innate imperfection must always b