but from that moment
the good Lord struck it with a curse, and filled it white-hot with
hell-fire, so that, if anybody held it a few minutes in their hand, it
would burn to the bone. The old sinner made believe that she was in
great affliction for the death of her daughter-in-law, and that it was
all an accident, and the poor young man went raving mad,--but that awful
rosary the old hag couldn't get rid of. She couldn't give it away,--she
couldn't sell it,--but back it would come every night, and lie right
over her heart, all white-hot with the fire that burned in it. She gave
it to a convent, and she sold it to a merchant, but back it came; and
she locked it up in the heaviest chests, and she buried it down in the
lowest vaults, but it always came back in the night, till she was worn
to a skeleton; and at last the old thing died without confession or
sacrament, and went where she belonged. She was found lying dead in her
bed one morning, and the rosary was gone; but when they came to lay her
out, they found the marks of it burned to the bone into her breast.
Father Anselmo used to tell us this, to show us a little what hell-fire
was like."

"Oh, please, Jocunda, don't let us talk about it any more," said Agnes.

Old Jocunda, with her tough, vigorous organization and unceremonious
habits of expression, could not conceive the exquisite pain with which
this whole conversation had vibrated on the sensitive being at her right
hand,--that what merely awoke her hard-corded nerves to a dull vibration
of not unpleasant excitement was shivering and tearing the tenderer
chords of poor little Psyche beside her.

Ages before, beneath those very skies that smiled so sweetly over
her,--amid the bloom of lemon and citron, and the perfume of jasmine and
rose, the gentlest of old Italian souls had dreamed and wondered what
might be the unknown future of the dead, and, learning his lesson from
the glorious skies and gorgeous shores which witnessed how magnificent a
Being had given existence to man, had recorded his hopes of man's future
in the words--_Aut beatus, aut nihil_; but, singular to tell, the
religion which brought with it all human tenderness and pities,--the
hospital for the sick, the refuge for the orphan, the enfranchisement
of the slave,--this religion brought also the news of the eternal,
hopeless, living torture of the great majority of mankind, past and
present. Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried this awful