Page:Balkan Short Stories.djvu/15



IGH in the Apennines it stood—a gloomy cloister. It towered blackly on the edge of a steep, forbidding, treeless abyss, and the sun beat pitilessly upon its bare, gray walls. There was something strange about this Cloister; here God and Satan dwelled side by side. God hid Himself behind the great altar in the church; Satan dwelled in the cell of the Prior, above his desk, and in fact right behind a picture. God knows to what school that picture belongs! It represented the Temptation of Saint Anthony. This had been a favorite subject for representation with a school of painters. Teniers and Tassaert had represented the subject with humor, Bosch with great imagination; it had been given Rh