Before being called to the Papacy, St. Sylvester had been a zealous and holy priest for many years, but during a part of that time he had been obliged to live in hiding on Mount Soracte, the strange rock which raises itself from the Campagna, some twenty-five miles to the northeast of Rome, to culminate in a precipitous cliff two thousand two hundred and seventy feet high—as if arrested by the sight of the distant city. I think it was Byron who compared it to a wave about to break, and no other simile describes it half so well. I spent a heavenly day there in my youth and came away regretfully, not only because of the superb view of the Apennine panorama at which I had been gazing, but because of the ideal aloofness and sweetness of the atmosphere round the ruined convent on the summit, where, though I was then in the first flush of youth, I would gladly have remained for years. Soracte, under its present name, was well known to the Romans; Horace had sung of the mantle of the snow that lay on its rough sides in the winter; Virgil spoke of it reverently as one of the homes of Apollo, who had a temple there; so its name is not a contraction of St. Oreste, as some used to think, though a Church and monastery were dedicated to that saint on Soracte very early in our era. The monk who acted as our guide could not tell me much about him, but spoke of St. Sylvester’s sojourn on the mountain as if he had left it but the day before. The lonely peak was not always lonely, the geologists say. Long ages previous to the foundation of Rome the Apennines flung out their chain thus far; then came great heavings in earth’s fiery heart; she opened and the hills sank back whence they had come, and “the mountains were made plain”; they disappeared, leaving this solitary vanguard rock to mark their vanished limit and their actual sepulchre.