ittle life in struggles to call upon
her name.

She stood alone. Her small, bare, and silvery feet gleamed in the
black mirror of marble beneath her. Her hair, not as yet more than
half loosened for the night from its ball-room array, clustered, amid
a shower of diamonds, round and round her classical head, in curls like
those of the young hyacinth. A snowy-white and gauze-like drapery seemed
to be nearly the sole covering to her delicate form; but the mid-summer
and midnight air was hot, sullen, and still, and no motion in the
statue-like form itself, stirred even the folds of that raiment of very
vapor which hung around it as the heavy marble hangs around the Niobe.
Yet--strange to say!--her large lustrous eyes were not turned downwards
upon that grave wherein her brightest hope lay buried--but riveted in a
widely different direction! The prison of the Old Republic is, I think,
the stateliest building in all Venice--but how could that lady gaze so
fixedly upon it, when beneath her lay stifling her only child? Yon dark,
gloomy niche, too, yawns right opposite her chamber window--what,
then, _could_ there be in its shadows--in its architecture--in its
ivy-wreathed and solemn cornices--that the Marchesa di Mentoni had not
wondered at a thousand times before? Nonsense!--Who does not remember
that, at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror,
multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far-off
places, the wo which is close at hand?

Many steps above the Marchesa, and within the arch of the water-gate,
stood, in full dress, the Satyr-like figure of Mentoni himself. He was
occasionally occupied in thrumming a guitar, and seemed _ennuye_ to the
very death, as at intervals he gave directions for the recovery of his
child. Stupified and aghast, I had myself no power to move from the
upright position I had assumed upon first hearing the shriek, and must
have presented to the eyes of the agitated group a spectral and ominous
appearance, as with pale countenance and rigid limbs, I floated down
among them in that funereal gondola.

All efforts proved in vain. Many of the most energetic in the search
were relaxing their exertions, and yielding to a gloomy sorrow. There
seemed but little hope for the child; (how much less than for the
mother! ) but now, from the interior of that dark niche which has been
already mentioned as forming a part of the Old Republican prison, and
as fronting the lattice of t