But it was not the aspect of the place that engrossed the thoughts of our young traveller. His own plight made it seem to him more gloomy and terror-inspiring than it had been made by the passage of the flames that belched forth from the cave of the Cyclops. He saw before him a place of trials and of expiation, in face of which a cold perspiration burst from every pore. It was there that he was about to bid farewell to the world of art, to the society of enlightened men, to unchecked reveries, and to the studious leisure of the artist summoned to an exalted destiny. It was there that he must resume, after ten years of a highly-favored existence, the artisan's apron, the hateful sizing-pot, the conventional festoon, the decoration of reception rooms and corridors. And, worse than all the rest, it was there that he would have to work twelve hours a day and go to bed exhausted, lacking time and strength to read or muse in a picture gallery; there that he must resign himself to do without other society than that of the Sicilian common people, so poor and so unclean that the poetic charm of his features and his intellect could scarcely penetrate the rags and degradation of poverty. In a word, the gate of Catania was, to that poor exile, the gate of the accursed city described by Dante. At the thought, a torrent of tears, long held in check or turned aside, rushed from his eyes, and whoever had seen him thus, young, comely, pale, seated outside the gate of a palace, with his hand lying carelessly upon his injured foot, would inevitably have thought of the gladiator of old, wounded in combat, but weeping for his defeat rather than for the pain. [Illustration: _THE CARDINAL'S ESCORT._ _The bells of a number of mules ascending the hill, and the appearance of a strange caravan coming directly toward him, forcibly changed the current of Michelangelo Lavoratori's reflections._]