Among the common people of the towns and villages their relations were of the most comfortable kind, their depredations being chiefly confined to the rich and prosperous, who, as they wrung their wealth out of the people, were not considered particular objects of compassion when the same kind of high-handed treatment was extended toward themselves.

The most spirited and brave of the young peasantry, if they wished to secure the smiles of the girls of their neighborhood, and win hearts past redemption, found no surer avenue to favor than in joining the brigands.  The leaders of these bands sometimes piqued themselves on elegant tastes and accomplishments; and one of them is said to have sent to the poet Tasso, in his misfortunes and exile, an offer of honorable asylum and protection in his mountain-fortress.

Agostino Sarelli saw himself, in fact, a powerful chief; and there were times when the splendid scenery of his mountain-fastness, its inspiring air, its wild eagle-like grandeur, independence, and security, gave him a proud contentment, and he looked at his sword and loved it as a bride.  But then again there were moods in which he felt all that yearning and disquiet of soul which the man of wide and tender moral organization must feel who has had his faith shaken in the religion of his fathers.  To such a man the quarrel with his childhood’s faith is a never-ending anguish; especially is it so with a religion so objective, so pictorial, and so interwoven with the whole physical and nervous nature of man, as that which grew up and flowered in modern Italy.

Agostino was like a man who lives in an eternal struggle of self-justification,—­his reason forever going over and over with its plea before his regretful and never-satisfied heart, which was drawn every hour of the day by some chain of memory towards the faith whose visible administrators he detested with the whole force of his moral being.  When the vesper-bell, with its plaintive call, rose amid the purple shadows of the olive-silvered mountains,—­when the distant voices of chanting priest and choir reached him solemnly from afar,—­when he looked into a church with its cloudy pictures of angels, and its window-panes flaming with venerable forms of saints and martyrs,—­it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue.  How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ’s representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide.  He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart only to torture him.  He had heard priests scoff over the wafer they consecrated,—­he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the sacramental wine,—­and yet God had kept silence and not struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, “Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.  Is there a God that judgeth in the earth?”