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Maria.

O my dear Mother! this strange man has left me

Troubled with wilder fancies, than the Moon
Breeds in the love-sick maid who gazes at it,
Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye
She gazes idly—But that entrance, Mother!—

Foster-Mother.

Can no one hear. It is a perilous tale!

Maria.

No one?

Foster-Mother.

My husband's father told it me,

Poor old Leoni: Angels, rest his soul!
He was a woodman, and could fell, and saw,
With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam
Which props the hanging-wall of the old chapel? —
Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree,
He found a baby, wrapt in mosses lined
With thistle-beards, and such small locks of wool
As hang on brambles. Well, he brought him home,
And reared him at the then Lord Valez' cost;
And so the babe grew up a pretty boy—