It seemed to my sleeping fancy that I stood in a deep, serene light of shadowy purple, grave and sombre,—­a light which suggested to me the sound of low minor chords, the last notes of some organ voluntary, dying beneath a master’s touch, and rolling down the hazy aisles of an empty cathedral, out into the gloomy night, and upward to the stars.

A spirit floated in the air before me,—­a phantom draped in heavy sweeping robes of dense purple, but with eyes of such vivid and fiery brightness, that I could not look upon them; and my heart quailed in my bosom with a strange oppressive sense of fear and wonder.  Then I felt that her awful gaze was fixed upon me, and a voice, low and sonorous as the tones of an organ, broke on my ear with an intense pathos, unutterably solemn:—­

Daughter of earth, I am the spirit of the purple Nightshade, the Atropa Belladonna of the south,—­the scent of whose dusky chalice is the fume of bitterness; the taste of whose dark fruit is death.  And because the children and the maidens shun my poisonous berries, when they go out into the woods to make garlands for Mary’s shrine, or for wedding gala; and because the leech and herbalist find in me a marvellous balm to soothe the torments of physical anguish; because I give the sick man ease, and the sleepless man oblivion, and the miserable man eternal rest; because I am sombre of hue and unsweet of odour, able to calm, to hush, and to kill, the sons of earth have chosen me to be the emblem of silence.  There is a shadow on your brow:  my words sound strange and bitter to you; yet hear me:  for once on earth I dwelt with one who thought and labored in silence.  His name is inscribed upon no calendar of the world’s heroes; it is written only in heaven!

Not far from a certain large town in Piedmont there was once a miserable little cottage.  It had been let when I knew it, to a poor invalid woman and her only child, a boy about nine or ten years old.  They were very poor, this mother and son; and the little living they had, came mostly by means of needlework, which the woman did for people in the town, and by the sale of dried herbs and suchlike.  As for the cottage itself, it was a crazy, tumble-down tenement, half in ruins, and all the outside walls of it were covered with clinging ivies and weeds and wild climbing plants.  I was one of these.  I grew just underneath the solitary window of the small chamber wherein the poor woman slept,—­the whole but consisted of only two rooms,—­and I climbed and sprouted and twisted my head in and out of the network of shrubs about me, and clung to the crumbling stone of the wall, and stretched myself out and up continually, until I grew so tall, that I could look in at the casement and see the inside of the room.  It was in the summertime that I first managed to do this, and I remember well what a burning, sultry summer it was!  Everything seemed parched and calcined under the pitiless Italian sun, and the whole sky was like a great blazing topaz,—­yellow, and hard to look at; and the water disappeared from the runlets, and there was not a breath of wind from one end of the sky to the other.