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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VII.--MAY, 1861.--NO. XLIII.


AGNES OF SORRENTO.


CHAPTER I.

THE OLD TOWN.


The setting sunbeams slant over the antique gateway of Sorrento, fusing
into a golden bronze the brown freestone vestments of old Saint Antonio,
who with his heavy stone mitre and upraised hands has for centuries kept
watch thereupon.

A quiet time he has of it up there in the golden Italian air, in
petrified act of blessing, while orange lichens and green mosses from
year to year embroider quaint patterns on the seams of his sacerdotal
vestments, and small tassels of grass volunteer to ornament the folds
of his priestly drapery, and golden showers of blossoms from some more
hardy plant fall from his ample sleeve-cuffs. Little birds perch and
chitter and wipe their beaks unconcernedly, now on the tip of his nose
and now on the point of his mitre, while the world below goes on its way
pretty much as it did when the good saint was alive, and, in despair of
the human brotherhood, took to preaching to the birds and the fishes.

Whoever passed beneath this old arched gateway, thus saint-guarded,
in the year of our Lord's grace--, might have seen under its shadow,
sitting opposite to a stand of golden oranges, the little Agnes.

A very pretty picture was she, reader.--with such a face as you
sometimes see painted in those wayside shrines of sunny Italy, where the
lamp burns pale at evening, and gillyflower and cyclamen are renewed
with every morning.

She might have been fifteen or thereabouts, but was so small