ns. We spoke
first of the mutiny with which we had been threatened; this led us on to
the topic of assassination; and that offered a temptation to the Master
more strong than he was able to resist. He must tell me a tale, and show
me at the same time how clever he was, and how wicked. It was a thing he
did always with affectation and display; generally with a good effect.
But this tale, told in a high key in the midst of so great a tumult, and
by a narrator who was one moment looking down at me from the skies and
the next peering up from under the soles of my feet--this particular
tale, I say, took hold upon me in a degree quite singular.

"My friend the count," it was thus that he began his story, "had for an
enemy a certain German baron, a stranger in Rome. It matters not what
was the ground of the count's enmity; but as he had a firm design to be
revenged, and that with safety to himself, he kept it secret even from
the baron. Indeed, that is the first principle of vengeance; and hatred
betrayed is hatred impotent. The count was a man of a curious,
searching mind; he had something of the artist; if anything fell for him
to do, it must always be done with an exact perfection, not only as to
the result, but in the very means and instruments, or he thought the
thing miscarried. It chanced he was one day riding in the outer suburbs,
when he came to a disused by-road branching off into the moor which lies
about Rome. On the one hand was an ancient Roman tomb; on the other a
deserted house in a garden of evergreen trees. This road brought him
presently into a field of ruins, in the midst of which, in the side of a
hill, he saw an open door, and, not far off, a single stunted pine no
greater than a currant-bush. The place was desert and very secret; a
voice spoke in the count's bosom that there was something here to his
advantage. He tied his horse to the pine-tree, took his flint and steel
in his hand to make a light, and entered into the hill. The doorway
opened on a passage of old Roman masonry, which shortly after branched
in two. The count took the turning to the right, and followed it,
groping forward in the dark, till he was brought up by a kind of fence,
about elbow-high, which extended quite across the passage. Sounding
forward with his foot, he found an edge of polished stone, and then
vacancy. All his curiosity was now awakened, and, getting some rotten
sticks that lay about the floor, he made a fire. In front of