As life advances, the dividing lines grow sharper and more defined.  He has got his Latin, and, in getting it, read Virgil and Horace and Cicero, as his brothers did.  But henceforth St. Augustine becomes his Cicero; and he already begins to suspect that the best service his Homer and Thucydides and Demosthenes have rendered him has been by enabling him to understand St. Chrysostom.  What is Herodotus to the Lives of the Saints, or Livy to Baronius?  Why should he waste his time on human nature in Tacitus, or follow, with Guicciardini, the tortuous paths of princes, when he can find lessons more to his taste, and wisdom more to his purpose, in Mabillon and Pallavicini?  His daily conversation is about the interests and concerns of his order, and, as he enters upon its duties, about the questions which those duties raise, and the rewards which their fulfilment promises or brings.  It was a great day for him and for his friends, when he first ascended the altar in cope and stole; but mass soon becomes a daily exercise, and, like all things done daily, sinks into routine.  A still more anxious day was it, when he first took his seat in the confessional to absolve and to condemn, to interpret and to enjoin, to listen to secrets which are like the lifting of the veil from one of the darkest mysteries of life, and feel the breath that bore them through the punctures of the thin partition fall on his cheek with a warmth that made his veins glow and his own breath come fast and thick.

I once heard a confession of murder from the murderer’s lips, as we sat alone, side by side, on the same sofa.  It was of a Sunday morning, bright, beautiful, and still, one of those days in which earth looks so pure and lovely that you can hardly believe sin could ever have found a home thereon.  He was a Sicilian, a gentleman by birth and fortune; and when he first came into the room, apologizing for the intrusion, and regretting that he was taking up my time with the business of a stranger, I thought that I had never seen a more intelligent face or felt more immediately at home with an utter stranger.  He began his story in a low, musical voice,—­Italian loses none of its softness in the mouth of a Sicilian,—­and I had followed him through a midnight ride over a wild and solitary road before I began to suspect how it was to end.  Then came the details:  a sudden meeting,—­angry words, heating to madness blood already too hot,—­a shot,—­a body writhing on the ground in its own blood.  His voice hardly changed, though the tones, perhaps, were somewhat deeper; but his cheek flushed and his eye kindled, and I felt such a sickening shudder come over me as I had never felt before.  He was dressed in white, too,—­spotless white, as it seemed to me, when he first came into the room; I had even admired the neatness of his trousers and waistcoat:  but as I looked and listened, big drops of blood seemed to come out upon them,—­a drop for every word, slowly exuding from some mysterious source, till he was bathed all over in it from head to foot.  A day or two afterwards, I met him upon the Pincian, in the midst of walkers and riders and all the gay throng of a crowded promenade at its most crowded hour.  But the blood was on him still, and, under the locks that clustered darkly over his forehead, the ineffaceable mark of Cain.