The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it.  Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolo Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl.  While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed.  The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response.  There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea:  they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood.  They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled.

We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence.

“Did you ever,” said the cicerone after we had left the building, “hear such music as that?”

“The papal choir does not equal it,” we answered with one voice.

The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went on: 

“Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President?  No?  Ah, what a fine man!  You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand!  Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, ’We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.’  I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little,—­thus!  Moshu Feelmore was convinced.  Said he, ’There is no other echo in the world besides this.  You are right.’  I am unique,” pursued the cicerone, “for making this echo.  But,” he added with a sigh, “it has been my ruin.  The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day.  When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo.  Says the king, ‘Pfui!’”—­here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject—­“‘make me the echo!’ I was forced,” concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, “to howl half an hour without ceasing.”

II.

THE FERRARA ROAD.