Adone gazed across the river to the moss-grown walls which had once been fortifications still visible on the side of the hill, and to the frowning donjon, the blackened towers, the ruined bastions, of what had been once the Rocca, with the amber light and rosy clouds of the unseen sun behind them.

“Teach me Latin, your reverence,” was all he said.

“I have always offered to do so,” said Don Silverio.

Adone was again silent, swinging his slender brown feet in the water, and looking always upward at the evening sky beyond the great round shape of the dismantled fortress.

He learned some Latin with much difficulty, studying hard in his evening leisure in the winters, and with time he could decipher for himself, with assistance from Don Silverio, the annals of the Tor’alba; and he saw that it was as certain as anything grown over with the lichens and cobwebs of time can be that he himself was the last of the race.

“Your father used to say something of the sort,” his mother said; “but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done.  ’What does it matter either?’ he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river.  For your father’s father had worn the red shirt in his youth, as I have told you often, and thought but little of lords and princes.”

But Adone was different; the past allured him with the fascination which it has for poets and scholars; he was neither of these, except in a vague, unconscious way; but his imagination was strong and fertile once aroused; the past, as suggested to him by the vicar, by degrees became to him a living thing and nearer than the present, as it is to scholars who are poets.  He was neither scholar nor poet; but he loved to muse upon that far-off time when his forefathers had been lords of the land and of the water.

He did not want the grandeur, he did not envy the power which they had possessed; but he wished that, like them, he could own the Edera from its rise in the hills to its fall into the sea.

“Oh, dear river!” he sang to it tenderly, “I love you.  I love you as the dragon-flies do, as the wagtails do, as the water voles do; I am you and you are me.  When I lean over you and smile, you smile back to me.  You are beautiful in the night and the morning, when you mirror the moon and play with the sunbeams, when you are angry under the wind, and when you are at peace in the heat of the noon.  You have been purple with the blood of my people, and now you are green and fresh as the leaves of the young vine.  You have been black with powder and battle, now you are fair with the hue of the sky and the blue of the myosotis.  You are the same river as you were a thousand years ago, and yet you only come down to-day from the high hills, young and strong, and ever renewing.  What is the life of man beside yours?”