and Odo, seated under
the vine pergola in the late summer light, and tasting the abate's Val
Pulicella while he turned over the warped pages of old codes and
chronicles, felt the stealing charm of a sequestered life.

He had learned from Gamba that Crescenti was a faithful parish priest as
well as an assiduous scholar, but he saw that the librarian's
beneficence took that purely personal form which may coexist with a
serene acceptance of the general evils underlying particular hardships.
His charities were performed in the old unquestioning spirit of the
Roman distribution of corn; and doubtless the good man who carries his
loaf of bread and his word of hope into his neighbour's hovel reaps a
more tangible return than the lonely thinker who schemes to undermine
the strongholds of injustice. Still there was a perplexing contrast
between the superficiality of Crescenti's moral judgments and the
breadth and penetration of his historic conceptions. Odo was too
inexperienced to reflect that a man's sense of the urgency of
improvement lies mainly in the line of his talent: as the merchant is
persuaded that the roads most in need of mending are those on which his
business makes him travel. Odo himself was already conscious of living
in a many-windowed house, with outlooks diverse enough to justify more
than one view of the universe; but he had no conception of that
concentration of purpose that may make the mind's flight to its goal as
direct and unvarying as the course of a homing bird. The talk turning on
Gamba, Crescenti spoke of the help which the hunchback gave him in his
work among the poor.

"His early hardships," said he, "have given him an insight into
character that my happier circumstances have denied me; and he has more
than once been the means of reclaiming some wretch that I despaired of.
Unhappily, his parts and learning are beyond his station, and will not
let him rest in the performance of his duties. His mind, I often tell
him, is like one of those inn parlours hung with elaborate maps of the
three Heretical Cities; whereas the only topography with which the
virtuous traveller need be acquainted is that of the Heavenly City to
which all our journeyings should tend. The soundness of his heart
reassures me as to this distemper of the reason; but others are less
familiar with his good qualities and I tremble for the risks to which
his rashness may expose him."

The librarian went on to say that Gamba had a p