When he
came in sight of the house, he knelt down in the dust by a pile of
rails and prayed. He prayed that he might feel bad, and be
distressed about himself. As he prayed he heard distinctly, and yet
not as a disturbance, the multitudinous croaking of the frogs by the
meadow spring. It was not discordant with his thoughts; it had in it
a melancholy pathos, as if it were a kind of call to the unconverted.
What is there in this sound that suggests the tenderness of spring,
the despair of a summer night, the desolateness of young love? Years
after it happened to John to be at twilight at a railway station on
the edge of the Ravenna marshes. A little way over the purple plain
he saw the darkening towers and heard "the sweet bells of Imola."
The Holy Pontiff Pius IX. was born at Imola, and passed his boyhood
in that serene and moist region. As the train waited, John heard
from miles of marshes round about the evening song of millions of
frogs, louder and more melancholy and entreating than the vesper call
of the bells.
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