I have not wanted to interrupt Bruno, nor to hurry him in his story, tedious as it is in the telling. Little event after little event of his secular and of his religious life befalls with the trivial monotony of dropping rain. But is it not just so that these little events and endless others like them must have fallen on the soul of the living Bruno, soaking in, soaking in, unnoticed as rain, until his very humors ran with their humor? Now their humor was the spirit of the old world, the spirit of his Father’s House. Would it not be curious if, having pulled down this ridiculous old dwelling and in the very act of dancing among its ruins, Bruno should suddenly come to see that it was the only house his soul, being such a soul as it was, could dwell in? If something of this kind did not happen at a moment of his life we are fast approaching, then only the gods know what did happen. But I am anticipating, or rather laying up reflections against our hour of need. For the moment we have no more than come to the day in Bruno’s life when he stepped out of his Father’s House to make his way _ins Freie hinaus_. * * * * * Fifty years ago, before Berti had unearthed the documents of this trial, it was difficult to trace the life of Bruno. Since then it has become well-nigh impossible. Documents are a great embarrassment to the conscientious historian. They are there, these documents, and have to be put in the text; the truth about the case must be relegated to the foot-notes. Now the text runs in this wise: “In 1576 ... I was in Rome at the Convent of Minerva, obedient to the orders of Maestro Sisto de Luca, Procurator of the Order. Thither I had gone to present myself because at Naples two processes had been instituted against me, the first for having given away certain images of the saints and retaining only a crucifix, it being thought that this showed a lack of respect for the images of the saints; and the other for having said to a novice who was reading a story of the Seven Beatitudes in verse, What did he think he was doing with a book like that?--why didn’t he throw it away and read rather some other book, as the lives of the Holy Fathers? This process was renewed at the time I went to Rome, with other articles added to it which I do not know, for I abandoned the order and threw aside the habit and went to Noli in the region of Genoa, where I supported myself four or five months teaching grammar to young boys.”