as nearer. I turned
again and counted fifty--it was almost touching it. With desperate will
I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a
tremble. A white human hand lay in the moonlight! Such an awful sinking
at the heart--such a sudden gasp for breath! I felt--I cannot tell what
I felt. When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again. But
no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him. I
counted again and looked--the most of a naked arm was exposed. I put my
hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then
--the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn
down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death! I raised to a sitting
posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare
breastline by line--inch by inch--past the nipple--and then it disclosed
a ghastly stab!

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a
hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient. I went out at the window,
and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it
was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.--I was
not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it. It seemed
perfectly delightful. That man had been stabbed near the office that
afternoon, and they carried him in there to doctor him, but he only lived
an hour. I have slept in the same room with him often since then--in my
dreams.

Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan
Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been
silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.

The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle. This was
the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a
man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the
faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and
wherever he found it. His heart, his hand, and his purse were always
open. With his story in one's mind he can almost see his benignant
countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days
when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full
of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the
instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying
with all, h