mass at these cold altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldy steps and kiss the relics which are shown on great occasions.  But no one stays; they hurry, after muttering their prayers, from the fever-stricken spot, reserving their domestic pieties and customary devotions for the brighter and newer chapels of the fashionable churches in Ravenna.  So the old monk is left alone to sweep the marsh water from his church floor, and to keep the green moss from growing too thickly on its monuments.  A clammy conferva covers everything except the mosaics upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy the course of age.  Christ on His throne sedet aternumque sedebit:  the saints around him glitter with their pitiless uncompromising eyes and wooden gestures, as if twelve centuries had not passed over them, and they were nightmares only dreamed last night, and rooted in a sick man’s memory.  For those gaunt and solemn forms there is no change of life or end of days.  No fever touches them; no dampness of the wind and rain loosens their firm cement.  They stare with senseless faces in bitter mockery of men who live and die and moulder away beneath.  Their poor old guardian told us it was a weary life.  He has had the fever three times, and does not hope to survive many more Septembers.  The very water that he drinks is brought him from Ravenna; for the vast fen, though it pours its overflow upon the church floor, and spreads like a lake around, is death to drink.  The monk had a gentle woman’s voice and mild brown eyes.  What terrible crime had consigned him to this living tomb?  For what past sorrow is he weary of his life?  What anguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude?  Yet he looked simple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life were over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with a friend’s greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across the fen-lands in a cloud of soft destructive fever-mist.

Another monument upon the plain is worthy of a visit.  It is the so-called Colonna dei Francesi, a cinquecento pillar of Ionic design, erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victorious after one of the bloodiest battles ever fought.  The Ronco, a straight sluggish stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered with laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments, confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses.  A few cypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of a neighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous.  Those mason bees are like posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or a Luxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenic or Egyptian temples with clay hovels.  Nothing differs but the scale; and while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering, man destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates.