“Thou hesitated,” observed the Baron de Willading, who suspected an intention to escape.

“Signore; the look at even a stone is a melancholy office, when it is known to be the last.  I have often climbed to the Col, but I shall never dare do it again; for, though the honorable and worthy chatelain, and the most worthy bailiff, are willing to pay their homage to a Doge of Genoa in his own person, they may be less tender of his honor when he is absent.  Addio, caro San Bernardo!  Like me, thou art solitary and weather-beaten, and like me, though rude of aspect, thou hast thy uses.  We are both beacons—­thou to tell the traveller where to seek safety, and I to warn him where danger is to be avoided.”

There is a dignity in manly suffering, that commands our sympathies.  All who heard this apostrophe to the abode of the Augustines were struck with its simplicity and its moral.  They followed the speaker in silence, however, to the point where the path makes its first sudden descent.  The spot was favorable to the purpose of Il Maledetto.  Though still on the level of the lake, the convent, the Col, and all it contained, with the exception of a short line of its stony path, were shut from their view, by the barrier of intervening rock.  The ravine lay beneath, ragged, ferruginous, and riven into a hundred faces by the eternal action of the seasons.  All above, beneath, and around, was naked, and chaotic as the elements of the globe before they received the order-giving touch of the Creator.  The imagination could scarce picture a scene of greater solitude and desolation.

“Signore,” said Maso, respectfully raising his cap, and speaking with calmness, “this confusion of nature resembles my own character.  Here everything is torn, sterile, and wild; but patience, charity, and generous love, have been able to change even this rocky height into an abode for those who live for the good of others.  There is none so worthless that use may not be made of him.  We are types of the earth our mother; useless, and savage, or repaying the labor, that we receive, as we are treated like men, or hunted like beasts.  If the great, and the powerful, and the honored, would become the friends and monitors of the weak and ignorant, instead of remaining so many watch-dogs to snarl at and bite all that they fear may encroach on their privileges, raising the cry of the wolf each time that they hear the wail of the timid and bleating lamb, the fairest works of God would not be so often defaced.  I have lived, and it is probable that I shall die an outlaw; but the severest pangs I ever know come from the the mockery which accuses my nature of abuses that are the fruits of your own injustice.  That stone,” kicking a bit of rock from the path into the ravine beneath, “is as much master of its direction after my foot has set its mass in motion, as the poor untaught being who is thrown upon the world, despised, unaided, suspected, and condemned even before he has sinned,