We were little troubled by railways in the Sabines in my young days; such innovations had not ever been contemplated, and all our travelling was done on horses or mules. It was rather a long ride from Olevano to Subiaco and I was very tired and stiff when our little party straggled into the road leading up to the town. But—what is youth without some impossible romance? My “romance” had marched that way the year before, with his company of Zouaves, condemned to garrison duty for three dreary months in the hills; and _this_ (“parents, do you think you know your children?”) was the utterly idiotic motive which had made me drag my three unsuspecting men to Subiaco! I wanted to pick up a stone that had been touched by the adored one’s foot! Very gingerly I climbed down off my weary beast, selected a fine smooth pebble from the side of the road where I knew my idol must have passed, and, with much difficulty, scrambled up again. The pebble was afterwards polished, cut, and set in Etruscan gold, as a pendant, marked with a mystic inscription signifying a challenge to fate to lessen the ardour of my attachment; and when I found it among my trinkets, long years after my real fate had found and claimed me, I could have wept for the delicious rainbow-tinted sorrows of first youth! But the treasure once secured, and the luxury of tears reserved for some future unoccupied moment, I gave myself up to the magic of the consecrated cleft in the hills, and, in spite of my own profound ignorance in those days, in spite of the sceptical attitude of my Presbyterian stepfather and the Anglican Reverendo, and my dear Marion’s bubbling fun and laughter—for he was a mere boy then, of the most irrepressible kind—the “Sacro Speco” made a profound impression on me.