day.

It was after the last office in this Easter week, when a man came
through the evening shadows towards the church. His name was Emilio
Raffagiolo, but he was always known as the Girellone,--the rover. Such
nicknames replace the baptismal names of the country-people till the
latter are almost forgotten, whilst the family name is scarcely ever
employed at all in rural communities. The Girellone was a carter, who
had been in service at the water-mill for some few months. He was a man
of thirty or thereabouts, with a dusky face and a shock head of hair,
and hazel eyes, dull and yet cunning. He was dressed now in his festal
attire, and he had a round hat set on one side of his head: he doffed it
as he entered the church. He could not read or write, and his ideas of
his creed were hazy and curious: the Church represented to him a thing
with virtue in it, like a charm or a bunch of herbs; it was only
necessary, he thought, to observe certain formulae of it to be safe
within it; conduct outside it was of no consequence. Nothing on earth
can equal in confusion and indistinctness the views of the Italian
rustic as regards his religion. The priest is to him as the medicine-man
to the savage; but he has ceased to respect his counsels, whilst
retaining a superstitious feeling about his office. This man, doffing
his hat, entered the church and approached the confessional, crossing
himself as he did so. Gesualdo, with a sigh, prepared to receive his
confession, although the hour was unusual, and the many services of the
day had fatigued him until his head swam and his vision was clouded. But
at no time had he ever availed himself of any excuse of time or physical
weakness to avoid the duties of his office. Recognizing the carter, he
wearily awaited the usual tale of low vice and petty sins, some
drunkenness, or theft, or lust gratified in some unholy way, and
resigned himself wearily to follow the confused repetitions with which
the rustic of every country answers questions or narrates circumstances.
His conscience smote him for his apathy. Ought not the soul of this
clumsy, wine-sodden boor to be as dear to him as that of lovelier
creatures?

The man answered the usual priestly interrogations sullenly and at
random; he could not help doing what he did, because superstition drove
him to it and was stronger for the time than any other thing; but he was
angered at his own conscience and afraid of what he did: his limbs
trembled,