On the following morning, Flemming and Berkleystarted on their way to Innsbruck, like Huon of Bordeaux and Scherasmin on their way to Babylon. Berkley's self-assumed duty was to console his companion; a duty which he performed like an old Spanish Matadora, a woman whose business was to attend the sick, and put her elbow into the stomach of the dying to shorten their agony. BOOK IV. Epigraph "Mortal, they softly say, Peace to thy heart! We too, yes, mortal, Have been as thou art; Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed, Seeing in part, Tried, troubled, tempted,-- Sustained,--as thou art." CHAPTER I. A MISERERE. In the Orlando Innamorato, Malagigi, the necromancer, puts all the company to sleep by reading to them from a book. Some books have this power of themselves and need no necromancer. Fearing, gentle reader, that mine may be of this kind, I have provided these introductory chapters, from time to time, like stalls or Misereres in a church, with flowery canopies and poppy-heads over them, where thou mayest sit down and sleep. No,--the figure is not a bad one. This book does somewhat resemble a minster, in the Romanesque style, with pinnacles, and flying buttresses, and roofs, "Gargoyled with greyhounds, and with many lions Made of fine gold, with divers sundry dragons." You step into its shade and coolness out of the hot streets of life; a mysterious light streams through the painted glass of the marigold windows, staining the cusps and crumpled leaves of the window-shafts, and the cherubs and holy-water-stoups below. Here and there is an image of the Virgin Mary; and other images, "in divers vestures, called weepers, stand in housings made about the tomb"; and, above all, swells the vast dome of heaven, with its star-mouldings, and the flaming constellations, like the mosaics in the dome of St. Peter's. Have you not heard funeral psalms from the chauntry? Have you not heard the sound of church-bells, as I promised; mysterious sounds from the Past and Future, as from the belfries outside the cathedral; even such a mournful, mellow, watery peal of bells, as is heard sometimes at sea, from cities afar off below the horizon? I know not how this Romanesque, and at times flamboyant, style of architecture may please thecritics. They may wish, perhaps, that I had omitted some of my many ornaments, my arabesques, and roses, and fantastic spouts, and Holy-Roods and Gallilee-steeples. But would it then have been Romanesque?