rs, "here's the very thing for us."

And without explaining his words or where he was taking me, he made me
follow the crowd and enter the palace.

After mounting a magnificent marble staircase and crossing a very long
suite of apartments rather poorly furnished,--which is customary in
Italian palaces, all their luxury being put into ceilings, statues,
paintings, and other objects of art,--we reached a room that was wholly
hung with black and lighted by quantities of tapers. It was, of course,
a _chambre-ardente_. In the middle of it on a raised platform surmounted
by a baldaquin, lay a _thing_, the most hideous and grotesque thing you
can possibly conceive. Imagine a little old man whose hands and face had
reached such a stage of emaciation that a mummy would have seemed to you
in comparison plump and comely.

Clothed in black satin breeches, a violet velvet coat cut _a la
Francaise_, a white waistcoat embroidered in gold, from which issued
an enormous shirt-frill of point d'Angleterre, this skeleton had cheeks
covered with a thick layer of rouge which heightened still further the
parchment tones of the rest of his skin. Upon his head was a blond wig
frizzed into innumerable little curls, surmounted by an immense plumed
hat jauntily perched to one side in a manner which irresistibly provoked
the laughter of even the most respectful visitors.

After one glance given to this ridiculous and lamentable exhibition,--an
obligatory part of all funerals, according to the etiquette of the Roman
aristocracy,--Desroziers exclaimed: "There's the end; now come and see
the beginning."

Not replying to any of my questions, because he was arranging a dramatic
effect, he took me to the Albani gallery and placed me before a statue
representing Adonis stretched on a lion's skin.

"What do you think of that?" he said.

"What?" I replied at a first glance; "why, it is as fine as an antique."

"Antique as much as I am!" replied Desroziers. "It is a portrait in
youth of that wizened old being we have just seen dead."

"Antique or not, it is a masterpiece," I said. "But how is all this
beauty, or its hideous caricature, to get us to Sicily? That is the
question."

"I'll tell you," replied Desroziers. "I know the family of that old
scarecrow. His niece married the Comte de Lanty, and they have long
wanted to buy this statue which the Albani museum won't give up at any
price. They have tried to have it copied, but they never got anyt