and that it was all an accident, and the poor young man went raving mad,—­but that awful rosary the old hag couldn’t get rid of.  She couldn’t give it away,—­she couldn’t sell it,—­but back it would come every night, and lie right over her heart, all white-hot with the fire that burned in it.  She gave it to a convent, and she sold it to a merchant, but back it came; and she locked it up in the heaviest chests, and she buried it down in the lowest vaults, but it always came back in the night, till she was worn to a skeleton; and at last the old thing died without confession or sacrament, and went where she belonged.  She was found lying dead in her bed one morning, and the rosary was gone; but when they came to lay her out, they found the marks of it burned to the bone into her breast.  Father Anselmo used to tell us this, to show us a little what hell-fire was like.”

“Oh, please, Jocunda, don’t let us talk about it any more,” said Agnes.

Old Jocunda, with her tough, vigorous organization and unceremonious habits of expression, could not conceive the exquisite pain with which this whole conversation had vibrated on the sensitive being at her right hand,—­that what merely awoke her hard-corded nerves to a dull vibration of not unpleasant excitement was shivering and tearing the tenderer chords of poor little Psyche beside her.

Ages before, beneath those very skies that smiled so sweetly over her,—­amid the bloom of lemon and citron, and the perfume of jasmine and rose, the gentlest of old Italian souls had dreamed and wondered what might be the unknown future of the dead, and, learning his lesson from the glorious skies and gorgeous shores which witnessed how magnificent a Being had given existence to man, had recorded his hopes of man’s future in the words—­Aut beatus, aut nihil; but, singular to tell, the religion which brought with it all human tenderness and pities,—­the hospital for the sick, the refuge for the orphan, the enfranchisement of the slave,—­this religion brought also the news of the eternal, hopeless, living torture of the great majority of mankind, past and present.  Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried this awful mystery as a secret and unexplained anguish; saints wrestled with God and wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of Church and sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of the human race, not the glad tidings of salvation, but the sentence of immitigable doom.

The present traveller in Italy sees with disgust the dim and faded frescoes in which this doom is portrayed in all its varied refinements of torture; and the vivid Italian mind ran riot in these lurid fields, and every monk who wanted to move his audience was in his small way a Dante.  The poet and the artist give only the highest form of the ideas of their day, and he who cannot read the “Inferno” with firm nerves may ask what the same representations were likely to have been in the grasp of coarse and common minds.