etic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire
possession of his soul, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as
simple as any one of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco
d'Assisci. His mother had been a German servant-girl, married out of a
small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and serious
Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western coast as he
was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed had obtained
intense power; and the office he filled was to him a heaven-given
mission, which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of every earthly
appetite and every selfish thought.

"He is too good to live," said his old housekeeper.

It was a very simple and monotonous life which was led by him in his
charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they went
away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not forced
by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines, nor
like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was a
healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in the wilderness, where
its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if they
chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought on by
too much new wine at close of autumn. Marca was not pretty, nor
historical, nor picturesque, nor uncommon in any way: there are five
hundred, five thousand, villages like it, standing among corn-lands and
maize-fields and mulberry-trees, with its little dark church, and its
whitewashed presbytery, and its dusky red-tiled houses, and its great
silent empty villa, that used to be a fortified and stately palace and
now is given over to the rats and the spiders and the scorpions. A very
quiet little place, far away from cities and railways, dusty and
uncomely in itself, but blessed in the abundant light and the divine
landscape which are around it, and of which no one in it ever thought,
except this simple young priest, Gesualdo Brasailo.

Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most
happiness to the possessor of it,--happiness altogether unalloyed and
unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere
ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian
feeling; to an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine, and a
cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks the
mountains hateful and a city divin