affectionate indignation of his brother, too good a man to be made the
confidant of wrong, or have eyes for it, if such exist.

Thus, in the poetical justice which does not fail to be done in the
prose narrative of life, while men hastened, the moment a cry was
raised against Don Alessandro, to echo it back with all kinds of
imputations both on himself and his employees, every man held his
breath, and many wept, when the mortal remains of Don Carlo passed;
feeling that in him was lost a benefactor, a brother, a simple, just
man.

Don Carlo was a Knight of Malta; yet with him the celibate life had
not hardened the heart, but only left it free on all sides to general
love. Not less than half a dozen pompous funerals were given in his
honor, by his relatives, the brotherhoods to which he belonged, and
the battalion of the Civic Guard of which he was commander-in-chief.
But in his own house the body lay in no other state than that of a
simple Franciscan, the order to which he first belonged, and whose vow
he had kept through half a century, by giving all he had for the good
of others. He lay on the ground in the plain dark robe and cowl, no
unfit subject for a modern picture of little angels descending to
shower lilies on a good man's corpse. The long files of armed men,
the rich coaches, and liveried retinues of the princes, were little
observed, in comparison with more than a hundred orphan girls whom his
liberality had sustained, and who followed the bier in mourning robes
and long white veils, spirit-like, in the dark night. The trumpet's
wail, and soft, melancholy music from the bands, broke at times the
roll of the muffled drum; the hymns of the Church were chanted, and
volleys of musketry discharged, in honor of the departed; but much
more musical was the whisper in which the crowd, as passed his mortal
frame, told anecdotes of his good deeds.

I do not know when I have passed more consolatory moments than in the
streets one evening during this pomp and picturesque show,--for once
not empty of all meaning as to the present time, recognizing that
good which remains in the human being, ineradicable by all ill, and
promises that our poor, injured nature shall rise, and bloom again,
from present corruption to immortal purity. If Don Carlo had been a
thinker,--a man of strong intellect,--he might have devised means of
using his money to more radical advantage than simply to give it in
alms; he had only a kind human hea