Don Silverio was a learned man and a holy man, and should have despised such vanities, but an historic past had great seduction for him; a militant race fascinated him against his conscience, and aristocracy allured him despite all his better judgement; it seemed to him that if he had learned that he had come from a knightly gens such as this of the Tor’alba, he would have been more strongly moved to self-glorification than would have become a servant of the Church.  He himself had no knowledge even of his own near parentage; he had been a forsaken child, left one dark autumn night in the iron cradle of the gates of a foundling hospital in Reggio Calabrese.  His names had been bestowed on him by the chaplain of the institution; and his education had been given him by an old nobleman of the town, attracted by his appearance and intelligence as a child.  He was now fifty years of age; and he had never known anything of kith and kin, or of the mingled sweetness and importunity of any human tie.

Adone sat silent, looking up at the fortress of his forefathers.  He was more moved than his words showed.

“If we were lords of the land and the town and the people, we were also lords of the river,” was what he was thinking; and that thought moved him to strong pride and pleasure, for he loved the river with a great love, only equalled by that which he felt for his mother.

“They were lords of the river?” he asked aloud.

“Undoubtedly,” answered the priest.  “It was one of the highways of the province from east to west and vice versâ in that time; the signoria of this Rocca took toll, kept the fords and bridges and ferries; none could pass up and down under Ruscino without being seen by the sentinels on the ramparts here.  The Edera was different then; more navigable, perhaps less beautiful.  Rivers change like nations.  There have been landslips which have altered its course and made its torrents.  In some parts it is shallower, in others deeper.  The woods which enclosed its course then have been largely felled, though not wholly.  Sand has been dug from it incessantly, and rocks have fallen across it.  As you know, no boats or barges which draw any depth of water can ascend or descend it now without being towed by horses; and in some parts, as here, it is course, too precipitous in its fall for even small boats to adventure themselves upon it:  its shoals of lilies can blossom unmolested where its surface is level.  Yes; undoubtedly, the lords of Ruscino were also lords of the Edera, from its mouth to its source; and their river formed at once their strongest defence and their weakest point.  It was difficult sufficiently to guard so many miles of water; above all because, as I say, its course was so much clearer, and its depth so much greater, that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it from its mouth as far as this town in the Middle Ages; in fact, more than once, corsairs from the Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and though they were driven back by the culverins of the citadel, they every time carried off to slavery some of the youths and maidens of the plain.”