r 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 Sociale, where we
went to pass the rest of the evening, appeared hollow and improbable. We
thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness;
and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich
profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: _Salti mortali_ are those prodigious efforts of mental
arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your
account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.]

POOR RICHARD.

A STORY IN THREE PARTS.

PART II.

Richard got through the following week he hardly knew how. He found
occupation, to a much greater extent than he was actually aware of, in a
sordid and yet heroic struggle with himself. For several months now, he
had been leading, under Gertrude's inspiration, a strictly decent and
sober life. So long as he was at comparative peace with Gertrude and
with himself, such a life was more than easy; it was delightful. It
produced a moral buoyancy infinitely more delicate and more constant
than the gross exhilaration of his old habits. There was a kind of
fascination in adding hour to hour, and day to day, in this record of
his new-born austerity. Having abjured excesses, he practised temperance
after the fa