Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most happiness to the possessor of it,--happiness altogether unalloyed and unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian feeling; to an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine, and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks the mountains hateful and a city divine, he detests trees and adores crowds. But there are exceptions to all rules: there are poetic natures everywhere, though everywhere rare: Gesualdo was the exception in Marca and its neighborhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall green cane, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have told why he loved to watch these things: he thought it was because they reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the canebrakes; but he did love them, and they filled him with that vague emotion, half pleasure, half pain, known to all who love Nature for herself alone. His supper over, he went into his church: a little, red-bricked, whitewashed passage connected it with his parlor. The church was small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece said to be old, and by a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these matters: a Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then he preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of his people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints loved. Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her hands feeling her rosary, would think, as she heard the unintelligible eloquence, "Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upward were it not for me!"