Peace. From the peace of the sea Antonio's eyes wandered at last to the peace of the earth. Roving over wood and meadow and stream, his gaze came to rest at last in a little clearing between the ending of the orange-groves and the beginning of the vineyards. This was the monks' cemetery. It was three hundred years old, and the bones of nearly all the men who had lived and breathed and walked in the cloister under his feet lay beneath its pleasant turf and flowers. In the midst of the clearing a tall and slender cross glimmered pale through the dusk. There was not a trace of morbidity in his mood; yet Antonio beheld God's acre with more of longing than of shrinking. On so soft and gracious a night even a pagan would have found something alluring in the thought of death. After the day's glare the dimness was like a veil for tired eyes, and the scented air was like caressing arms, wooing one to everlasting rest. Antonio was no pagan and no voluptuary. He wanted to live strenuously for God, according to the Holy Rule: but it was good to feel that whenever the body should be worn and weary even unto death, there would be this plot of hallowed earth for its repose. With his eyes upon the pale cross Antonio looked through it into his future. He pictured himself living his life, as the hundreds of dead men in the cemetery had lived theirs, in the cell, in the chapel, and in the cloister, studying the divine mysteries, ever advancing toward perfection, praying for those who would not pray for themselves, rendering to God some of the praise and worship whereof the careless deprive Him, and striving, as it were, to redress the balance of the world. He saw himself giving his keen mind, his eager spirit, his young strength, his whole manhood to the divine office, so that the praising of God should not all be left to the weak, the simple, the aged, and to the fearful souls in the shadow of death. He knew full well that the world did not understand such a sacrifice, and that the mass of men were so entirely blind to the monastic ideal that they would look on him either as a cowardly shirker of life's duties or as a fanatical abstainer from its joys. But he had long ago learned to despise the judgments of the world. His sacrifice was acceptable to his Lord and it was the groundwork of his spirit's peace. It was as though Antonio heard from the midst of the stars His voice saying, _Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis: non quomodo mundus dat, ego do vobis_--"Peace, I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world giveth give I to you."