So I dined, and when I had finished, “Open that great sack of yours,” said he, “and I will send you on your way,” but I would not.  Just then four others came along in the sun, and on their heads were great bags of leaves, and he bade them come and eat in the shade.  Then said I, “What are those leaves that you have there, and what are you going to do with them?” And they laughed, making answer that they were silk.  “Silk?” said I.  “Silk truly,” said they, “since they are the leaves of the mulberry on which the little worm lives that presently will make it.”  So I went on my way with thanks, thinking in my heart:  Are we too then but leaves for worms, out of which, as by a miracle will pass the endless thread of an immortal life?

So I came to Pontassieve, crossing the river again where the road begins to leave it.  There is nothing good to say of Pontassieve, which has no beauty in itself, and where folk are rough and given to robbery.  A glance at the inn—­for so they call it—­and I passed on, glad in my heart that I had dined in the fields.  A mile beyond the town, on the Via Aretina, the road of the Consuma Pass leaves the highway on the left, and by this way it is good to go into Casentino; for any of the inns in the towns of the valley will send to Pontassieve to meet you, and it is better to enter thus than by railway from Arezzo.  However, I was for Vallombrosa; so I kept to the Aretine way.  I left it at last at S. Ellero, whence the little railway climbs up to Saltino, passing first through the olives and vines, then through the chestnuts, the oaks, and the beeches, till at last the high lawns appeared, and evening fell at the last turn of the mule path over the hill as I came out of the forest before the monastery itself, almost like a village or a stronghold, with square towers and vast buildings too, fallen, alas! from their high office, to serve as a school of forestry, an inn for the summer visitor who has fled from the heat of the valleys.  And there I slept.

It is best always to come to any place for the first time at evening or even at night, and then in the morning to return a little on your way and come to it again.  Wandering there, out of the sunshine, in the stillness of the forest itself, with the ruin of a thousand winters under my feet, how could I be but angry that modern Italy—­ah, so small a thing!—­has chased out the great and ancient order that had dwelt here so long in quietness, and has established after our pattern a utilitarian school, and thus what was once a guest-house is now a pension of tourists.  But in the abbey itself I forgot my anger, I was ashamed of my contempt of those who could do so small a thing.  This place was founded because a young man refused to hate his enemy; every stone here is a part of the mountain, every beam a tree of the forest, the forest that has been renewed and destroyed a thousand times, that has never known resentment, because it thinks only of life.  Yes, this is no place for hatred; since he who founded it loved his enemies, I also will let them pass by, and since I too am of that company which thinks only of life, what is the modern world to me with its denial, its doubt, its contemptible materialism, its destruction, its misery?  Like winter, it will flee away before the first footsteps of our spring.