"If he loves anyone on earth, I am that one, although I scolded and worried him well when he was my pupil. However, I am not perfectly certain that he will grant what I have to ask him in your behalf. He will have to overcome some repugnance; but I hope for the best." "Doubtless he knows all that you will not allow me to know myself of my affairs and my destiny?" "He? he knows nothing whatsoever of them, and he shall know nothing before you do. The little that you are both to know for the present, I will tell you both. After that, it may be that the Piccinino will guess more than he should. His penetration is very keen; but whatever he may guess, he will never tell you; and he will never ask you what he wants to find out; my mind is at rest so far as that is concerned. Now, silence; we are coming out of the woods into a cultivated and settled part of the mountain. We must be seen by as few people as possible on our way to the place where our man awaits us." They walked silently and cautiously along hedges and clumps of trees, keeping in the shadow and avoiding trodden paths; and in the gathering dusk they soon reached the Piccinino's abode. [Footnote 2: The gendarmes or police of the island.] [Footnote 3: People who attend to their business by night.] [Footnote 4: That is to say, a _villain_ or serf.] XXIV IL PICCININO On that side of the mountain which Fra Angelo and Michel had been constantly ascending for two hours, the large, thickly populated village of Nicolosi is the last civilized point at which the traveller who wishes to visit the top of Ætna stops for breath before entering the grand and imposing region of forests. This second belt is called _Silvosa_ or _Nemorosa_, and the cold is intense there. The vegetation then becomes depressingly wild and more sparse, until it finally disappears altogether under lichens and heaps of gravel, beyond which all is snow, sulphur, and smoke. Nicolosi and the magnificent landscape surrounding it were already enveloped in the evening mist when Michel tried to form some idea of the place where he was. The imposing mass of Ætna was of the same uniform shade, and he could barely distinguish, a mile above him, the frowning peak of _Monte-Rosso_, that subaltern volcano, one of the twenty or thirty sons of Ætna, extinct or recently opened furnaces, which rear their heads like a battery of artillery at its foot. It was Monte-Rosso that opened its black maw, less than two centuries ago, to vomit forth that death-dealing lava with which the bottom of the bay of Catania is still furrowed. To-day the peasants raise grapes and olives on débris which seems to be burning still.