Here, like a colony of ants, the generations had crowded one on another, now swept away by the stamp of a conqueror’s heel and now succeeded by another toiling swarm, building anew each time out of ruin, undaunted by the certainty of destruction, taught nothing by the fate of their precursors.  From the profound sense of despair which the contemplation of the uselessness of human effort, and the waste of human life, produces on the scholar’s mind, it was a relief to him to watch the gladness of its river, the buoyancy of its currents, the foam of white blossom on its acacia and syringa thickets, the gold sceptres and green lances of its iris-pseudacorus, the sweep of the winds through its bulrushes and canebreaks, the glory of colour in the blue stars of its veronica, the bright rosy spikes of its epilobium.  The river seemed always happy, even when the great rainfall of autumn churned it into froth and the lightnings illumined its ink-black pools.

It was on the river that he had first made friends with Adone, then a child of six, playing and splashing in the stream, on a midsummer noon.  Don Silverio also was bathing.  Adone, a little nude figure, as white as alabaster in the hot light, for he was very fair of skin, sprang suddenly out of the water on to the turf above where his breeches and shirt had been left; he was in haste, for he had heard his mother calling to him from their fields; an adder started out of a coil of bindweed and would itself round his ankle as he stooped for his clothes.

The priest, standing waist-deep in the river a few yards away, saw it before the child did, and cried out to him:  “Stand still till I come!  Be not afraid!” Adone understood, and, although trembling with terror and loathing as he realised his danger, and felt the slimy clasp of the snake, remained motionless as he was bidden to do.  In a second of time the priest had leaped through the water to his side, seized the adder, and killed it.

“Good boy,” he said to the child.  “If you had moved your foot the creature would have bitten you.”

Adone’s eyes filled with tears.

“Thank you, sir; thank you for mother,” he said very gently, for he was a shy child, though courageous.

The priest stroked his curls.

“There is death in the grass very often.  We should not fear death, but neither should we run risk of it uselessly, especially when we have a mother whom it would grieve.  Come and bathe at this spot, at this hour, to-morrow and every day, if you like.  I will be here and look after you, you are little to be alone.”

They were often together from that day onwards.

The brutishness and greed of his flock oppressed him.  He was sent here to have care of their souls, but where were their souls?  They would all have sold them to the foul fiend for a mess of artichokes fried in oil.  In such a solitude as this he had been glad to be able to teach and move the young malleable mind of Adone Alba; the only one of them who seemed to have any mind at all.  Adone also had a voice as sweet as a nightingale in the syringa bushes in May; and it pierced the gloom of the old naked gaunt church as a nightingale’s thrills through the dark hour before dawn.