eached the point where they had been begun in the fourteenth, and
pursued the track they had then followed some distance beyond the
junction; destroying or hiding their own commencement, as the serpent,
which is the type of eternity, conceals its tail in its jaws.

Sec. XIV. We cannot, therefore, _see_ the extremity, wherein lay the sting
and force of the whole creature,--the chamber, namely, built by the Doge
Gradenigo; but the reader must keep that commencement and the date of it
carefully in his mind. The body of the Palace Serpent will soon become
visible to us.

The Gradenigo Chamber was somewhere on the Rio Facade, behind the
present position of the Bridge of Sighs; i.e. about the point marked on
the roof by the dotted lines in the woodcut; it is not known whether low
or high, but probably on a first story. The great facade of the Ziani
Palace being, as above mentioned, on the Piazzetta, this chamber was as
far back and out of the way as possible; secrecy and security being
obviously the points first considered.

Sec. XV. But the newly constituted Senate had need of other additions to
the ancient palace besides the Council Chamber. A short, but most
significant, sentence is added to Sansovino's account of the
construction of that room. "There were, _near_ _it_," he says, "the
Cancellaria, and the _Gheba_ or _Gabbia_, afterwards called the Little
Tower."[114]

Gabbia means a "cage;" and there can be no question that certain
apartments were at this time added at the top of the palace and on the
Rio Facade, which were to be used as prisons. Whether any portion of the
old Torresella still remains is a doubtful question; but the apartments
at the top of the palace, in its fourth story, were still used for
prisons as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century.[115] I wish
the reader especially to notice that a separate tower or range of
apartments was built for this purpose, in order to clear the government
of the accusations so constantly made against them, by ignorant or
partial historians, of wanton cruelty to prisoners. The stories commonly
told respecting the "piombi" of the Ducal Palace are utterly false.
Instead of being, as usually reported, small furnaces under the leads of
the palace, they were comfortable rooms, with good flat roofs of larch,
and carefully ventilated.[116] The new chamber, then, and the prisons,
being built, the Great Council first sat in their retired chamber on the
Rio in the year