"Ay, my son. And who would not? Blessed Virgin! who would not after what
you underwent?"
And now he poured into my astonished ears the amazing story that had
overrun the country-side. It would seem that my cry in the night, my
exultant cry to Satan that I had defeated him, had been overheard by a
goatherd who guarded his flock in the hills. In the stillness he
distinctly heard the words that I had uttered, and he came trembling down,
drawn by a sort of pious curiosity to the spot whence it had seemed to him
that the cry had proceeded.
And there by a pool of the Bagnanza he had found me lying prone, my white
body glistening like marble and almost as cold. Recognizing in me the
anchorite of Monte Orsaro, he had taken me up in his strong arms and had
carried me back to my hut. There he had set about reviving me by friction
and by forcing between my teeth some of the grape-spirit that he carried in
a gourd.
Finding that I lived, but that he could not arouse me and that my icy
coldness was succeeded by the fire of fever, he had covered me with my
habit and his own cloak, and had gone down to Casi to fetch the priest and
relate his story.
This story was no less than that the hermit of Monte Orsaro had been
fighting with the devil, who had dragged him naked from his hut and had
sought to hurl him into the torrent; but that on the very edge of the river
the anchorite had found strength, by the grace of God, to overthrow the
tormentor and to render him powerless; and in proof of it there was my body
all covered with Satan's claw-marks by which I had been torn most cruelly.
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