""T ain't only that, bird in a cage. folks think they 're dull sometimes, settled down in a pint measure with one woman. Lordymighty! the women's dull, too, on'y they don't let on. Pious little devils! they go round washin' dishes an' moppin' up under the sto', and half on 'em wants to be trampin' like me, an' t'other half dunno what they want. Keep out on 't, I say! keep out on 't!"

they 're like a You look here! men

Nancy lifted her voice in a tuneful stave, the words satirically fit, but Cynthia was not listening. The notes fell upon her like a patter of unregarded rain, as she creased her gingerbread and beat her mind back from futile wonderment over her own plight when Andrew should be here alone.

"The house has got to be jes' so,' pursued Nancy. "The woman's got to be jes' so. They can come home all over gurry, but she's got to have on a clean apron an' her hair slicked up to the nines. They can set all the evenin' huskin' together an' hootin' over old stories, an' come stumblin' in when they git ready, an' find doughnuts an' pie set out complete. What's fair for one's fair for another, I say."

“No, it ain't!” cried Cynthia, suddenly awakened. She stood straight and slender in the middle of her kitchen. Defensive fires burned hotly in her eyes. "Nancy, I ain't goin' to have such talk in here. I can't stand it. You think of him gettin' all over dust an' dirt workin' like a dog. You think of it, Nancy! It's his house.

It's

no more 'n right he should have it the way he wants it. I should like to know if he ain't goin' to have anything the way he wants it?" Her voice choked in passionate championship of the man whose pride was hurt.

But Nancy only gave a derisive chuckle. "Law!" said she. "You need n't worry. I guess they'll look out for themselves. I never see a man yet but had time enough for that."

At five o'clock the house was in order and Nancy had started on her homeward way, a dollar in her pocket, and, despite some ruthless indifference on her part, a basket of food in her hand. Cynthia dismissed her with an unwitting solemnity.

"Good-by, Nancy," said she. "You've been a real help to me. I don't know how I should have got through it if it had n't been for you."

"It's clean as a ribbin," Nancy called back cheerfully. "But land! cleanin' up 's nothin'. Trouble is to keep it so. Well, I'll be pokin' along."

Cynthia stood and watched her wellknit figure swinging on between the willows that marked the road. Then she turned back to her clean house for a last look and the renewed certainty of its perfect state. She walked delicately about the kitchen, lest a grain of dust should be tracked upon the speckless floor. The food not yet cooled from the oven was in the pantry. All through the lower rooms there was the fragrance of cake and bread. It was a house set in order, and finding it perfect, she made herself sweet and clean, and changed her working dress for a crisper calico. In the doing, she thought solemnly how she had once helped bathe a child that had died at the poorhouse, and prepare it for burial. This body of hers was also being prepared, and though she had no words to say so, it seemed to her the body of her love. And all the time the sea kept calling her, with its assurances of manifold and solemn refuge.

Presently she was ready to go. She had made the clothing she had slipped off into a little bundle, to leave none but fresh things behind her, and now she took it in her hand and stepped out at the front door. That she closed, but the windows were still open. It was better that storms should invade the house than that he should find it inhospitably shut. Day and night could be trusted with their welcome to him.

But turning from the door, she smelled her garden, and its autumn bitterness of breath awoke in her a final pang of homesickness. She laid down her bundle and hurried round to the well, to draw bucket after bucket of water and drench the roots she had kept tended since the spring. It was a separate goodby to every one. Here were the delicate firstlings whose day had long been over, and the hollyhocks that had made the summer gay. Dahlias and asters were the ones to keep this later watch, but she sprinkled them impartially, whether they were to bloom again or wither till the winter's spell. The moon was rising behind the wooded hill, and there was suddenly a prophetic touch of frost in the air. She stood for a moment listening to the stillness, recognizing life as if it all came flooding in on her at once, only to retreat like a giant wave and wash some farther shore. Her brain apprehended what her tongue could never say. She understood the meaning of service and harmonious living. It was no more dull to her now than daily sunrise. She looked at Andrew's house, builded by another Gale over a hundred years ago. It meant more than a shelter. It was the roof of love, the nest of springing hopes. Yet being a child at heart, she could not stay after he had found her for one day unworthy, and she was too young to know how storms may pass.

The man came heavily along the darkened road and reached the gate as she did. She saw him and dropped her bundle in the shade of the lilac at the fence. Andrew did not speak. He threw open the gate, stepped in, and put his arms about her. He held her to him as we hold what is almost lost us through our own lax grasp; but when he spoke to her, she did not hear, and when he loosed his clasp to look at her, she sank down and would have fallen.

"What is it, dear? what is it, dear?" he kept saying, and she answered him with her tremulous breath upon his cheek. Presently they went up the path together, and in at the closed door. "By George, don't it smell good!" said Andrew. His voice, in nervous joviality, was shaking, like his hands. "Le' me git a light, honey. I've got to look at you. Got to make sure you 're here!

The blaze from the shining lamp struck full on her, and Andrew caught his breath. Cynthia looked like the angel of herself. Her tired face, overlaid by joy, was like that of a child awakened from sleep to unexpected welShe seemed an adoring handmaid, incredulous of the beauty of her task. Andrew felt the wistfulness of her air, the presence of things unknown to him. He went over to her and drew

come.

her nearer.

"You knew I'd come, he said. "You knew I could n't stan' it after

I'd been ugly to you. Look at this house! You fixed all up, an' made it neat as wax. I started just as they set down to supper, an' put for home. I've been scairt 'most to death all the afternoon. I dunno what I thought would happen to you, but I had to come."

"I've cleaned the house," said Cynthia, like a child. "I got old Nancy."

"Yes, dear, yes," he soothed her. "You knew I'd come. You knew I would n't stay away a night after I broke your heart. You tell about your weavin', dear. I want to hear it now.”

"My weavin'?" repeated Cynthia vaguely. The words roused her a little from her happy dream, and for one luminous instant she felt the significance of all the threads that make the web of life. She laughed. "'T was only Bachelor's Fancy," she said. "I learned it, that's all. There's lots o' things I'd ruther do. You go in the

I.

A THOUGHTFUL historian tells us that, between the fourteenth century and the nineteenth, Italy produced three great men. As the first of these, he names Machiavelli, who, he says, "taught the world to understand political despotism and to hate it; as the second, he names Sarpi, who "taught the world after what manner the Holy Spirit guides the Councils of the Church;" and as the third, Galileo, who "taught the world what dogmatic theology is worth when. it can be tested by science."

I purpose now to present the second of these. As a man, he was by far the greatest of the three and, in various respects, the most interesting; for he not only threw a bright light into the most important general council of the Church and revealed to Christendom the methods which there prevailed, — in a book which remains one of the half-dozen classic histories of the world, but he fought the most bitter fight for humanity against the papacy ever known in any Latin nation, and won a victory by which the whole world has profited ever since. Moreover, he was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.

He was born at Venice in 1552, and it may concern those who care to note the subtle interweaving of the warp and woof of history that the birth year of

this most resourceful foe that Jesuitism ever had was the death year of St. Francis Xavier, the noblest of Jesuit apostles.

It may also interest those who study the more evident evolution of cause and effect in human affairs to note that, like most strong men, he had a strong mother; that while his father was a poor shopkeeper who did little and died young, his mother was wise and serene.

From his earliest boyhood, he showed striking gifts and characteristics. He never forgot a face once seen, could take in the main contents of a page at a glance, spoke little, rarely ate meat, and, until his last years, never drank wine.

Brought up, after the death of his father, first by his uncle, a priest, and then by Capella, a Servite monk, in something better than the usual priestly fashion, he became known, while yet in his boyhood, as a theological prodigy. Disputations in his youth, especially one at Mantua, where, after the manner of the time, he successfully defended several hundred theses against all comers, attracted wide attention, so that the Bishop gave him a professorship, and the Duke, who, like some other crowned heads of those days, notably Henry VIII. and James I., liked to dabble in theology, made him a court theologian. But the duties of this position were uncongenial: a flippant duke, fond of putting questions which the wisest theo

logian could not answer, and laying out work which the young scholar evidently thought futile, apparently wearied him. He returned to the convent of the Servites at Venice, and became, after a few years' novitiate, a friar, changing, at the same time, his name; so that, having been baptized Peter, he now became Paul.

His career soon seemed to reveal another and underlying cause of his return he evidently felt the same impulse which stirred his contemporaries, Lord Bacon and Galileo; for he began devoting himself to the whole range of scientific and philosophical studies, especially to mathematics, physics, astronomy, anatomy, and physiology. In these he became known as an authority, and before long was recognized as such throughout Europe. It is claimed, and it is not improbable, that he anticipated Harvey in discovering the circulation of the blood, and that he was the forerunner of noted discoveries in magnetism. Unfortunately the loss of the great mass of his papers by the fire which destroyed his convent in 1769 forbids any full estimate of his work; but it is certain that among those who sought his opinion and advice were such great discoverers as Acquapendente, Galileo, Torricelli, and Gilbert of Colchester, and that every one of these referred to him as an equal, and indeed as a master. It seems also established that it was he who first discovered the valves of the veins, that he made known the most beautiful function of the iris, its contractility, and that various surmises of his regarding heat, light, and sound. have since been developed into scientific truths. It is altogether likely that, had he not been drawn from scientific pursuits by his duties as a statesman, he would have ranked among the greater investigators and discoverers, not only of Italy, but of the world.

ishment should not be vengeance, but reformation. In these days and in this country, where one of the most serious of evils is undue lenity to crime, this opinion may be imputed to him as a fault; but in those days, when torture was the main method in procedure and in penalty, his declaration was honorable both to his head and heart.

With all his devotion to books, he found time to study men. Even at school, he had seemed to discern those who would win control. They discerned something in him also; so that close relations were formed between him and such leaders as Contarini and Morosini, with whom he afterwards stood side by side in great emergencies.

Important missions were entrusted to him. Five times he visited Rome to adjust perplexing differences between the papal power and various interests at Venice. He was rapidly advanced through most of the higher offices in his order, and in these he gave a series of decisions which won the respect of all entitled to form an opinion.

Naturally he was thought of for high place in the Church, and was twice presented for a bishopric; but each time he was rejected at Rome, partly from family claims of less worthy candidates, partly from suspicions regarding his orthodoxy. It was objected that he did not find the whole doctrine of the Trinity in the first verse of Genesis, that he corresponded with eminent heretics of England and Germany, that he was not averse to reforms, that, in short, he was not inclined to wallow in the slime from which had crawled forth such huge incarnations of evil as John XXIII., Julius II., Sixtus IV., and Alexander VI.

His orthodox detractors have been wont to represent him as seeking vengeance for his non-promotion; but his after career showed amply that personal grievances had little effect upon him. It is indeed not unlikely that when he saw bishoprics for which he knew himself

well fitted given as sops to poor creatures utterly unfit in morals or intellect, he may have had doubts regarding the part taken by the Almighty in selecting them; but he was reticent, and kept on with his work. In his cell at Santa Fosca, he quietly and steadily devoted himself to his cherished studies; but he continued to study more than books or inanimate nature. He was neither a bookworm nor a pedant. On his various missions he met and discoursed with churchmen and statesmen concerned in the greatest transactions of his time, notably at Mantua with Oliva, secretary of one of the greatest ecclesiastics at the Council of Trent; at Milan with Cardinal Borromeo, by far the noblest of all who sat in that assemblage during its eighteen years; in Rome and elsewhere with Arnauld Ferrier, who had been French Ambassador at the Council, Cardinal Severina, head of the Inquisition, Castagna, afterward Pope Urban VII., and Cardinal Bellarmine, afterward Sarpi's strongest and noblest opponent.

Nor was this all. He was not content with books or conversations; steadily he went on collecting, collating, and testing original documents bearing upon the great events of his time. The result of all this the world was to see later.

He had arrived at middle life and won wide recognition as a scholar, scientific investigator, and jurist, when there came the supreme moment of a struggle which had involved Europe for centuries, struggle interesting not only the Italy and Europe of those days, but universal humanity for all time.

a

During the period following the fall of the Roman Empire of the West there had been evolved the temporal power of the Roman Bishop. It had many vicissitudes. Sometimes, as in the days of St. Leo and St. Gregory, it based its claims

upon noble assertions of right and justice, and sometimes, as in the hands of pontiffs like Innocent VIII. and Paul V., it sought to force its way by fanaticism.

Sometimes it strengthened its authority by real services to humanity, and sometimes by such monstrous frauds as the Forged Decretals. Sometimes, as under Popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., it laid claim to the mastership of the world, and sometimes, as with the majority of the pontiffs during the two centuries before the Reformation, it became mainly the appanage of a party or faction or family.

Throughout all this history, there appeared in the Church two great currents of efficient thought. On one side had been developed a theocratic theory, giving! the papacy a power supreme in temporal as well as in spiritual matters throughout the world. Leaders in this during the Middle Ages were St. Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans; leaders in Sarpi's days were the Jesuits, represented especially in the treatises of Bellarmine at Rome and in the speeches of Laynez at the Council of Trent.1

Among the many centres of this struggle was Venice. She was splendidly religious as religion was then understood. She was made so by her whole environment. From the beginning she had been a seafaring power, and seafaring men, from their constant wrestle with dangers ill understood, are prone to seek and find supernatural forces. Nor was this all. Later, when she had become

1 This has been admirably shown by N. R. F. Brown in his Taylorian Lecture, pages 229-234, in volume for 1889-99.