The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867.

els on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugu

sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P--had collected into earthern amphor? the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was cons

custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of Ecelino

kly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P--, a del

had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But all the horrors for which we had come wer

rayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated him down upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into the Ba

as another punishment of w

y mind. "Was this skeleto

thout so much as winking an eye,

of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade-which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P--. Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I ac

f Ecelino's more merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in the penal

d that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish

rom the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood

torture,-all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and c