He was not deceived by the kindly courtesy of the terms in which the offer was made, but at last was induced to yield to it; he saw that in the seclusion of these great neglected forests he would be able to hide his own identity in safety from the world; and he had been now eighteen months in the woodlands, regarded by the country people as a mere agent of their lords, and known only by his baptismal name of Cyrille, called by the forest-folks Cirillo. Fortunately for himself, he had learned the language when a youth from a tutor, who had translated the “Divina Commedia” into German, and wide as is the gulf between the Italian of scholars and the dialects of the provinces, he had the facility of his nation in acquiring foreign tongues, and quickly adapted himself to the idiom of the people of the forest. He was intensely unhappy; he was separated from all he had known and loved from birth; he had lost everything he had possessed and cherished, and brave men have killed themselves for sorrows less than his; but the active and open-air life saved him from falling into despondency or ill health, and he earnestly occupied himself with the condition of the peasants and the interest of the proprietors. He had received unlimited powers from the Gandolfo princes, in whose vast estates these woods in all their antiquity and extent were but a mere patch of verdure never visited. To a man, exiled, ruined, with a price set on his head in his own country, and with his heart aching ceaselessly for all he had left for ever, it was a welcome solitude, a blessed, a thrice-blessed sanctuary. Sometimes he thought he was already dead and in the Elysian fields, so profound was the silence, so sweet the air, so spiritual the green light under the trees. When the woodlanders climbed the summits of the colossal pines to gather the ripe cones, they could see if they cared to look, and if the day were clear, a glistening ray of gold, a shining band of silver, and the one was the cross of St Peter’s and the other was the Tyrhemian Sea. To them these said nothing; vaguely they knew that Rome was the throne of the Viceroy of God, whence sins were remitted and life eternal was given, but of the sea they had never heard, though the light of the Pharos of Palo was visible on clear nights from the higher ground of their forest. But to Cyrille, when he mounted into the high pine-tops or climbed the crumbling stair of an old watch-tower, to gaze from its roof over the vast verdure of these woods westward that speck of sunlit gold, that streak of sparkling light spoke, as they must ever speak so long as earth and sea shall last, to the scholar and the student.