2.  A Magdalene in the desert.  The desert is a little coal-cellar of an arch, containing a skull and a profusion of pink and white paper bouquets, the two largest of which the Magdalene is hugging while she is saying her prayers.  She is a very self-sufficient lady, who we may be sure will not stay in the desert a day longer than she can help, and while there will flirt even with the skull if she can find nothing better to flirt with.  I cannot think that her repentance is as yet genuine, and as for her praying there is no object in her doing so, for she does not want anything.

3.  In the next desert there is a very beautiful figure of St. John the Baptist kneeling and looking upwards.  This figure puzzles me more than any other at Montrigone; it appears to be of the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century; it hardly reminds me of Gaudenzio, and still less of any other Valsesian artist.  It is a work of unusual beauty, but I can form no idea as to its authorship.

I wrote the foregoing pages in the church at Montrigone itself, having brought my camp-stool with me.  It was Sunday; the church was open all day, but there was no Mass said, and hardly anyone came.  The sacristan was a kind, gentle, little old man, who let me do whatever I wanted.  He sat on the doorstep of the main door, mending vestments, and to this end was cutting up a fine piece of figured silk from one to two hundred years old, which, if I could have got it, for half its value, I should much like to have bought.  I sat in the cool of the church while he sat in the doorway, which was still in shadow, snipping and snipping, and then sewing, I am sure with admirable neatness.  He made a charming picture, with the arched portico over his head, the green grass and low church wall behind him, and then a lovely landscape of wood and pasture and valleys and hillside.  Every now and then he would come and chirrup about Joachim, for he was pained and shocked at my having said that his Joachim was someone else and not Joachim at all.  I said I was very sorry, but I was afraid the figure was a woman.  He asked me what he was to do.  He had known it, man and boy, this sixty years, and had always shown it as St. Joachim; he had never heard anyone but myself question his ascription, and could not suddenly change his mind about it at the bidding of a stranger.  At the same time he felt it was a very serious thing to continue showing it as the Virgin’s father if it was really her grandmother.  I told him I thought this was a case for his spiritual director, and that if he felt uncomfortable about it he should consult his parish priest and do as he was told.