of
which had been decorated with huge frescoes, in charcoal, by no less a
hand than Franzoni himself, whose fate it had once been to pass months
here. Taking for his subjects the lives of the various refugees who had
sojourned in the Tana, he had illustrated them in a series of bold and
vigorous sketches, and assuredly every breach of the Decalogue had here
its portraiture, with some accompanying legend beneath to show in whose
honour the picture had been painted. Pippo, who had supplied from
memory all the incidents thus communicated, regarded these as
perfect treasures, and was wont to show them with all the pride of a
connoisseur. 'The maestro '--so he ever called Franzoni--'the maestro,'
said he, 'never saw Cimballi, who strangled the Countess of Soissons,
and yet, just from my description, he has made a likeness his brother
would swear to. And there, look at that fellow asking alms of the
Cardinal Frescobaldi--that 's Fornari. He 's merely there to see the
cardinal, and he's sure he can recognise him; for he is engaged to stab
him on his way to the Quirinal, the day of his election for Pope. The
little fellow yonder with the hump is the Piombino, who poisoned his
mother. He was drowned in the lake out there. I don't think it was quite
fair of the maestro to paint him in that fashion'; and here he would
point to a little humped-backed creature rowing in a boat, with the
devil steering, the flashing eyes of the fiend seeming to feast on the
tortures of fear depicted in the other's face.

Several there were of a humorous kind. Here, a group of murderous
ruffians were kneeling to receive a pontifical blessing. There, a party
of Papal carbineers were in full flight from the pursuit of a single
horseman armed with a bottle; while, in an excess of profanity that
Pippo shuddered to contemplate, there was a portrait of himself, as a
saint, offering the safeguard of the Tana to all persecuted sinners; and
what an ill-favoured assemblage were they who thus congregated at his
shrine!

Poor Gerald had lain for days gazing on the singular groupings and
strange scenes these walls presented. At first, to his disordered
intellect, they were but shapes of horror, wild and incongruous. The
savage faces that scowled on him in paint sat, in his dreams, beside his
pillow. The terrible countenances and frantic gestures were carried into
his sleeping thoughts, and often did he awake, with a cry of agony,
at some fearful scene of crime