saith?"

"Oh! your holiness," broke in Gerard, blushing and gasping, "sure, here
is one who will treasure your words all his life as words from Heaven."

"In that case," said the Pope, "I am fairly caught. As Francesco here
would say--

{ouk estin ostis est' anyr eleutheos}.

I came to taste that eloquent heathen, dear to me e'en as to thee, thou
paynim monk; and I must talk divinity, or something next door to it.
But the youth hath a good and a winning face, and writeth Greek like an
angel. Well then, my children, to comprehend the ways of the Church, we
should still rise a little above the earth, since the Church is between
heaven and earth, and interprets betwixt them.

"The question is then, not how vulgar men feel, but how the common
Creator of man and beast doth feel, towards the lower animals. This, if
we are too proud to search for it in the lessons of the Church, the next
best thing is to go to the most ancient history of men and animals."

Colonna. "Herodotus."

"Nay, nay; in this matter Herodotus is but a mushroom. Finely were we
sped for ancient history, if we depended on your Greeks, who did but
write on the last leaf of that great book, Antiquity."

The friar groaned. Here was a Pope uttering heresy against his demigods.

"'Tis the Vulgate I speak of. A history that handles matters three
thousand years before him pedants call 'the Father of History.'"

Colonna. "Oh! the Vulgate? I cry your holiness mercy. How you frightened
me. I quite forgot the Vulgate."

"Forgot it? art sure thou ever readst it, Francesco mio?"

"Not quite, your holiness. 'Tis a pleasure I have long promised myself,
the first vacant moment. Hitherto these grand old heathen have left me
small time for recreation."

His Holiness. "First then you will find in Genesis that God, having
created the animals, drew a holy pleasure, undefinable by us, from
contemplating of their beauty. Was it wonderful? See their myriad forms;
their lovely hair and eyes, their grace, and of some the power and
majesty: the colour of others, brighter than roses, or rubies. And when,
for man's sin, not their own, they were destroyed, yet were two of each
kind spared.

"And when the ark and its trembling inmates tumbled solitary on the
world of water, then, saith the word, 'God remembered Noah, and the
cattle that were with him in the ark.'

"Thereafter God did write His rainbow in the sky as a bond that earth
should be flooded no more; and betwee