rpetual festivity and
singing,--when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the
mountain, and, seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked down
on the peaceful landscape.

Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain, over
whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tinged with
the evening light; around him the desolate convulsed waste,--so arid, so
supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanted dream, the
beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, the picturesque
islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyed with the violet
and pink and purple of the evening sky. The thin new moon and one
glittering star trembled through the rosy air.

The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by the toil of
his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the Ave Maria pealing
from the different churches of Naples, filling the atmosphere with a soft
tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if spirits in the air took up and
repeated over and over the angelic salutation which a thousand earthly
lips were just then uttering. Mechanically he joined in the invocation
which at that moment united the hearts of all Christians, and as the words
passed his lips, he thought, with a sad, desolate longing, of the hour of
death of which they spake.

"It must come at last," he said. "Life is but a moment. Why am I so
cowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to struggle? Am I a warrior of
the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long for the
ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor for happiness?
Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is the world made so
lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girt with splendor and
beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance and toil were all we were
sent here for, why not make a world grim and desolate as this around
me?--then there would be nothing to seduce us. But our path is a constant
fight; Nature is made only to be resisted; we must walk the sharp blade of
the sword over the fiery chasm to Paradise. Come, then!--no
shrinking!--let me turn my back on everything dear and beautiful, as now
on this landscape!"

He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone, stumbling and
climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava, which grated and
crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic ring. Sometimes a broken
fragment or two wou