Just then—by way of compensation, Berliet having fortunately slowed down over a bad bit—an old altar-piece of a Holy Family stepped down out its frame and came wandering toward them in the broad light of day. On the large mild gray ass—a real altar-piece ass—sat St. Anna wrapped in a faded blue mantle, carrying on her arm a sleeping child. At her right walked the child’s mother, whose thin olive cheek and wide, timid eyes seemed half ghostly under the white linen held together with one hand under her chin. Young St. John led the ass. A wreath of golden-brown curls blew about his golden-red cheeks, and he wore goat-hide shoes, and had cross-gartered legs. Jane now says they never saw them at all. That it was just a mirage, or a bit of glamourie, and that there is nothing remaining in new Italy which could look so like the typical old Italy—but if Jane is right then how did the two happen to have exactly the same glamour at exactly the same moment? How could they both imagine the benign smile of that strayed altar picture? Is it likely that a motor car would lend itself to sacred visions? I ask you that! There was certainly some illusion—not sacred—about 43the dare-devilishness of that Englishman who once spent a moonlit night at the temples, for a little farming village lies close to the enclosure that shuts off the temples from the highway, the inhabitants of which village seemed as meek as sheep and anything but foolhardy, and there was reason to believe that they spend every night there, whether the moon shines or not. But the Temples were no illusion, standing in stately splendour in the midst of that wide shining green plain, by a sea of milky chalcedony, and in a semicircle behind them a garland of purple mountains crowned with snow. Great-pillared Neptune was all of dull, burned gold, its serried columns marching before the blue background with a curious effect of perfect vigour in repose, of power pausing in solid ease. No picture or replica gives the sense of this energy and power. Doric temples tend to look lumpish and heavy in reproductions, but the real thing at its very best (and this shrine of Neptune is the perfectest of Greek temples outside of Athens) has a mighty grace, a prodigious suggestion of latent force, of contained, available strength that wakes an awed delight, as by the visible, material expression of an ineffable, glorious, all-powerful god.