This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings. He called one winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a factitious lustre to my book-shelves and bringing out the values of the one or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial shabbiness of my wardrobe. “Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a _casa signorile_.” My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the _levatrice_) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a tired traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath. “Good! good!” he repeated, looking about him. “Books, porcelains, objects of _virtù_--I am glad to see that there are still such things in the world!” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had poured out for him. Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass; but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabañas, which I suspected him of preferring to the black weed of his native country. Under the influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the confessional. He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter in his experience. The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a “stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at Milan. On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America. I remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him. “A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.” He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room. “I had not observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio of the Brera. What a picture! _È stupendo_!” and he turned back to his seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.