A Creature of the Night

r observation that "adventures are to the adventurous," and certainly he who seeks fo

Lazun, still it will probably be interesting, which after all is something to be grateful for in this eminently commonplace age of facts and figures. Still, even he who seeks not to prove the truth

nothing. Not having any fixed income, I therefore could not live without doing something to earn my bread; and not having any business capacity, I foresaw failure would be my lot in mercantile enterprise. I was not good-looking enough to inveigle a

I took lessons, in singing, from Maestro Angello. Milan is a detestable city, hot and arid in summer, cold and humid in winter; and as a year after I arrived in the land of song the end of spring was unusually disagreeable, Maestro Angello went to V

ty of the gay rhymer Catullus, merry lover of Lesbia, who wept more tears over her sparrow than she did over her poet. The city of Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers as they were, who were recompensed for their short, unhappy lives by gaining immortality from the pen of Shakespeare as types of eter

so I studied industriously most of the day and wandered about most of the night in the soft, c

ure in which I was involved by the merest chance, although I confess that

rted streets in a listless, aimless fashion, contrasting in my own mind the magnificent Verona of the past with the dismal Verona of the present. Taken up with these fantastic dreamings, I did not notice p

ws of which gleamed here and there orange-coloured lights, while against the clear sky arose the tall steeples of the churches and the serrated outlines of full-foliaged trees. It was wonderfully beautiful, and the soft wind blowing t

de up my mind to stroll onward for some time. I might have visited that fraudulent tomb of Juliet in the moonlight, but as I had already seen it by day, and

felt that, should occasion arise, I could use my fists sufficiently well to protect myself. Being thus at ease regarding my perso

m find himself at midnight alone on a solitary moor, with the shadows of moonlight on every side, and all his inherent superstition will start to life, peopling the surrounding solitude with unseen phantoms, more terrible tha

ently much older than the one I had first seen, and there was a ruined wall around it, overtopped by tall, melancholy cypresses, looming black and funereal against the midnight sky. By this ti

dow of the cypress-trees--shadow dense as the darkness of Egypt--I viewed

o slept below; and while yonder, in frowning grey stone, stood a solemn pyramid, built in imitation of those Egyptian monsters by the Nile, here, near at hand, a miniature temple of white marble, delicate and fragile in construction, hinted at the graceful architecture of Greece. Among these myriad tombs arose the slend

cypress-trees, stared long and earnestly at this last abode of the old Veronese, when suddenly my hair bristled

nder among the living, whose nightly sleep so strangely mocks the semblance of that still repose which chains these spectres to their tombs during the day. This idea pierced my brain like a knife, and for the moment, under the influence of the hour, the ghastly scene,

ult. Beside this portal stood a life-sized figure in white marble of the Angel of Death, guarding the entrance with a flaming sword, the undulating blade of which seemed, to my startled eye,

threshold. The sight was so terrifying that I tried to mutter a prayer, feeling at the time as firm a belief in the visitation of the dead as any old woman; but

re was now a deep darkness over all the graveyard, a darkness in which I could see nothing, and on

w nothing in the thick darkness; but I felt it pass, by that sixth sense which is possessed by those who have highly strung nerves. In another moment the moon emerged from behind the clouds in all her splendo

figure walking quickly away in the direction of the Ponte Aleardi. It was draped in a long black cloak with a

ll it paused for a moment, and, throwing back its hood, looked towards the place where I was hiding. The space between u

ll as if she knew that some one had seen her terrible resurrection. On her delicate features there was a cold, stern look, like that of the ancient Medusa, and truly I felt as if I were turning into stone before the cruel glare of those eyes which seemed to pierce the gloom in which I lay hid. It will be said that I describe somew

ded rapidly away towards the Ponte Aleardi. Moved by curiosity and supernatural fear, I determined to follow this spectre and find out where

ving? Some vampire, lusting for blood, hastening towards the sleeping city to select her victim and drain him of his life-blood? All the wild, weird tales which I had heard recurred to my memory; all the terrible legends of Brittany, of the East, of Spain, and of the savage North. The memories of witches rifling

nd, with all my faculties sharpened by danger, I sped swiftly after this flying spectre, which, lookin