.

THE SUNSET.
I have heard tell of the calm that comes upon brave men when hope is dead and their doom has been pronounced.

Uncertainty may have tortured and made cowards of them; but once that uncertainty is dissolved and suspense is at an end, resignation enters their soul, and, possessing it, gives to their bearing a noble and dignified peace.

By the mercy of Heaven they are made, maybe, to see how poor and evanescent a thing is life; and they come to realise that since to die is a necessity there is no avoiding, as well might it betide to-day as ten years hence.
Such a mood, however, came not to soothe that last hour of mine, and yet I account myself no coward.

It was an hour of such torture and anguish as never before I had experienced--much though I had undergone--and the source of all my suffering lay in the fact that Madonna Paola was in the hands of the ogre of Cesena.