s humour, be changed his mind as to going home, and persuaded himself
he could live in it for the rest of his life. He accordingly took up his
abode with his attendants in a chapel, which had been deserted by its
clergy during the rage of war.

This vehement personage was standing one morning at the door of the
chapel in a state of unusual thoughtfulness, when he beheld coming
towards him, through a path in the green meadow before it, a lady of
a lovely aspect, accompanied by a bearded monk. They were followed by
something covered with black, which they were bringing along on a great
horse.

Alas! the lady was the widow of Zerbino, the Scottish prince, who spared
the life of Medoro, and who now himself lay dead under that pall. He
had expired in her arms from wounds inflicted during a combat with
Mandricardo; and she had been thrown by the loss into such anguish of
mind that she would have died on his sword but for the intervention of
the hermit now with her, who persuaded her to devote the rest of her days
to God in a nunnery. She had now come into Provence with the good man for
that purpose, and to bury the corpse of her husband in the chapel which
they were approaching.

Though the lady seemed lost in grief, and was very pale, and had her hair
all about the ears, and though she did nothing but weep and lament, and
looked in all respects quite borne down with her misery, nevertheless she
was still so beautiful that love and grace appeared to be indestructible
in her aspect. The moment the Saracen beheld her, he dismissed from his
mind all the determinations he had made to hate and detest

The gentle bevy, that adorns the world.

He was bent solely on obtaining the new angel before him. She seemed
precisely the sort of person to make him forget the one that had rejected
him. Advancing, therefore, to meet her without delay, he begged, in as
gentle a manner as he could assume, to know the cause of her sorrow.

The lady, with all the candour of wretchedness, explained who she was,
and how precious a burden she was conveying to its last home, and the
resolution she had taken to withdraw from a vain world into the service
of God. The proud pagan, who had no belief in a God, much less any
respect for restraints or fidelities of what kind soever, forgot his
assumed gravity when he heard this determination, and laughed outright at
the simplicity of such a proceeding. He pronounced it, in his peremptory
way, to be fooli