rd that song before. While she sang, her audience waited silently. At
last she finished, and they started to applaud. Shrunken hands beat
noisily against shrunken hands.

She seemed to watch them carefully, as though she were measuring the
degree of their appreciation. One man did not satisfy her. She went over
and dug into his face with long strokes of those long red nails until
his face was red and her fingers bloody. And when she finished her
second song that man clapped louder than any of them. He had learned his
lesson.

She ended by giving them each another roll and a dipper of water. Then,
lantern and basket in her hands, she walked away and disappeared down
the tunnel. The blind men, crying and cursing in their impotent rage,
sank down on their stone beds.

I went to my friend, and took his hand.

"George! George Seabrook!" I whispered.

He sat up and cried, "Who calls me? Who is there?"

I told him, and he started to cry. At last he became quiet enough to
talk to me. What he told me, with slight variants, was the story of all
the men there and all the men who had been there but who had died. Each
man had been master for a day or a week. Each had found the cellar door
and had come to the Donna Marchesi for the key. Some had been suspicious
and had written their thoughts on the wall of their bedroom. But one and
all had, in the end, found their curiosity more than they could resist
and had opened the door. On the other side they had been overpowered and
chained to a pillar, and there they had remained till they died. Some of
them lived longer than the rest. Smith of Boston had been there over two
years, though he was coughing badly and did not think that he could last
much longer. Seabrook told me their names. They were the best blood of
America, with three Englishmen and one Frenchman.

"And are you all blind?" I whispered, dreading the answer.

"Yes. That happens the first night we are here. She does it with her
nails."

"And she comes every night?"

"Every night. She feeds us and sings to us and we applaud. When one of
us dies, she unchains the body, and throws it down a hole somewhere. She
talks to us about that hole sometimes and brags that she is going to
fill it up before she stops."

"But who is helping her?"

"I think it is the real-estate man. Of course, the old devils upstairs
help. I think that they must drug us. Some of the men say that they went
to sleep in their beds and woke, chaine