Only one highway traversed Le Selve, one which ran crosswise, and met the old coaching road which goes still, although scarcely ever used except by muleteers and peasantry, from Viterbo by Ronciglione, and Sutri to La Storta, and on to Rome itself; a road once the great artery of life between the Patrimonium Petri and the cities of Umbria, of Tuscany, and of Lombardy, a road once crowded by pilgrims of all nations; by the pomp of travelling cardinals, by the litter and lacqueys of regal women, by the strings of sumpter mules, the massed multitudes of armed horsemen, the straggling hordes of camp followers, the splendid retinue of Prince and Nuncio. Now, some dusty public vehicle, painfully drawn by blown and raw-boned horses, some string of charcoal-bearing asses, some long line of timber-wagons drawn by great white oxen, red-eyed, yoke-burdened, with heavy flanks and parching tongues, are all that the once great highway sees. But a past of more than two thousand years is touched at every step in these heather-covered lands, a past which makes the Borgia, the Farnese, the Medici, seem but as mere parvenues of a near hour. In the rocks are the sculptured tombs of a perished race; and the faithful soil holds the vanished nation’s arts and letters, and keeps their secrets which no living man can read. When he reached those loftiest summits where the wild doves and their foes the falcons made their nests, the whole panorama of what had once been Etruria and Latium was outstretched beneath him, and in the deep green light of the thick-woven branches he could read his Horace, his Strabo, his Marcus Aurelius, while, from far down below, the humble music of the belled flocks rose faintly to his ear in a gentle rhythm which has never ceased there through thrice a thousand years. And that resigned sadness which succeeds despair came to him in that sense of unceasing sorrow, of endless succession of creation and annihilation of which such a scene must ever speak to those who look upon it with the eyes which see, and with the ears which hear. He realised his own infinitesimal nothingness, the infinite beauty and the infinite ruthlessness of nature, and he seemed to hear, not the passing of the browsing flocks over the grass below, but the passage of the multitudes hurrying on their course from the womb to the grave, each runner passing the torch from his dying hand to the living hand of the runner who follows him in that fine figure which Lucretius has made immortal. But in these Elysian Fields there were rude realities, and his conscience, which was sensitive, never allowed him to evade them. He was there, not to steep his soul in poppied rest, but to serve the interests of his employers and of the lands and people committed to his charge.