ssors present that evening had made such
faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering
the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before
me here his _brochure_, printed last year at Padua, and containing
versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The
Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass,"
"Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces
which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and
which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and
familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma,
now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of "The Golden
Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version
of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the
"Evangeline" is now engaged.

At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of
our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons.
To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.

"Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."

"We mean those under the Villa P----."

"Exactly."

There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's
voice; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful
experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You
don't mean that those are _not_ the veritable Ecelino prisons?"

"Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the
tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."

"But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"

"Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside
of the old city walls."

"And those tortures and the prisons are all"--

"Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P---- cannot conceive.
But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he
can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."

"But the custodian--how could he lie so?"

Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
believed what he said."

The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness,
and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground
under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Soc