The "hermit priest," as he was now called, had of earthly possessions so little that he could have vied with the lowly Nazarine in the splendor of his poverty. Of crucifixes, devotional mementoes, and other religious trinkets, sweetly suggestive of better and happier days, he had preserved a few. His greatest solace was in half a dozen well-thumbed small volumes, between whose covers none peered but himself. He was ever regular at his devotions; for notwithstanding he had grievously sinned, as he declared, he was constantly striving to outlive its horrid memory, and to repair the injury he had done his Master's cause. He possessed one article of property that tinges his sojourn at Council Grove with a delightfully romantic remembrance among the very limited number now living there, who knew of the vagaries of the remarkably strange man; these were sometimes his confidants and friends, within a limited degree. It was a rudely constructed mandolin, which during all the years of his erratic pilgrimage he had tenaciously clung to, until its exterior presented a confused mass of scratches and dents, indicative of hard usage. Despite all that, curious as it may seem, by some mysterious means its rich tones had been preserved in their original purity and depth. On the evenings of Kansas' incomparable Indian summer, during the early part of which season he was living in his cave near Council Grove, the "hermit priest," seated on a projecting ledge at the mouth of his rocky and isolated retreat, would sweep the strings of his treasured instrument with a touch as light, deft, and sorrowfully tender as a maiden whose pure young heart had just been thrilled by its first breath of love. To those who were so fortunate--and they were very few--as to be invited to spend an hour with him, his vesper hymns, rendered in his exquisite tenor voice, were as soul-inspiring as the gentle earnestness of a young girl's prayer. His sometime Neapolitan songs and soft airs of his native isle were as sweet as the chant of the angels he invoked when in a deeply religious mood, and his heart-feeling tones mingled sadly with the soughing of the evening breeze in the dense foliage on the margin of the placid Neosho that flowed near by. Thus, in the calm enjoyment of his self-imposed solitude, he lived with "The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell, His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well." Among the various languages necessary for the communication of ideas between the motley crowd comprising the civilization of the then remote region, there was none that Matteo Boccalini did not understand and speak fluently, so liberal had been his education in that particular.