tral poniard and more fearful contact with fleshless Vanozzas and
mouldering Giulias, the Pope urged, or seemed to urge, his course amid
phantom princes and cardinals, priests and courtesans, soldiers and
serving-men, dancers, drinkers, dicers, Bacchic and Cotyttian workers of
whatsoever least beseemed the inmates of a Pontifical household, until,
arrived in the fifth chamber, close by the, to him, invisible picture of
the Resurrection, he sank exhausted into a spacious chair that seemed
placed for his reception, and for a moment closed his eyes. Opening them
immediately afterwards, he saw with relief that the phantoms had vanished,
and that he confronted what at least seemed a fellow-mortal, in the ancient
ratcatcher, habited precisely as Cardinal Barbadico had described, yet, for
all his mean apparel, wearing the air of one wont to confer with the
potentates of the earth on other subjects than the extermination of rats.

"This is noble of your Holiness--really," he said, bowing with mock
reverence. "A second Leo the Great!"

"I tell you what, my man," responded Alexander, feeling it very necessary
to assert his dignity while any of it remained, "you are not to imagine
that, because I have humoured you so far as to grant you an audience at an
unusual place and time, I am going to stand any amount of your nonsense and
impertinence. You can catch our rats, can you? Catch them then, and you
need not fear that we shall treat you like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. You
have committed sundry rascalities, no doubt? A pardon shall be made out
for you. You want a patent or a privilege for your ratsbane? You shall have
it. So to work, in the name of St. Muscipulus! and you may keep the tails
and skins."

"Alexander," said the ratcatcher composedly, "I would not commend or
dispraise you unduly, but this I may say, that of all the Popes I have
known you are the most exuberant in hypocrisy and the most deficient in
penetration. The most hypocritical, because you well know, and know that I
know that you know, that you are not conversing with an ordinary
ratcatcher: had you deemed me such, you would never have condescended to
meet me at this hour and place. The least penetrating, because you
apparently have not yet discovered to whom you are speaking. Do you really
mean to say that you do not know me?"

"I believe I have seen your face before," said Alexander, "and all the more
likely as I was inspector of prisons when I was Cardinal.