ts with the waving of
a wand; anon, as he pronounced a spell, golden dragons glided away from
boughs laden with golden fruits. Well for him, doubtless, that in him
Nature had kneaded from ordinary clay as unimaginative a youth as could be
found in Venice: yet even so, dazzled with glamour, intoxicated with
illusion, less and less able to resist the cunningly mingled caresses,
entreaties, and menaces of Abano, he could not refrain from tracing a few
characters with the stylus, when, catching reflected in a mirror the old
magician's expression of wolfish glee, he dropped the instrument from his
grasp, and cast his eye upwards as if appealing to Heaven. But every drop
of blood seemed frozen in his frame as he beheld an enormous claw thrust
through the roof, member as it seemed of some being too gigantic to be
contained in the chamber or the tower itself. Cold, poignant, glittering as
steel, it rested upon a socket of the repulsive hue of jaundiced ivory,
with no vestige of a foot or anything to relieve its naked horror as, rigid
and lifeless, yet plainly with a mighty force behind it, it pointed at the
magician's heart. As Abano, following the youth's eye, caught sight of the
portent, his visage assumed an expression of frantic horror, his spells
died upon his lips, and the gorgeous figures became grinning apes or
blotchy toads: madly he seized the young man's hand, and strove to force
him to complete his signature. The robust youth felt as an infant in his
grasp, but ere the stylus could be again thrust upon him the first stroke
of the midnight hour rang through the chamber, and instantly the gigantic
talon pierced Abano from breast to back, projecting far beyond his
shoulders, and swept him upwards to the roof, through which both
disappeared without leaving a trace of their passage.

Horror and thankfulness rushed together into the young man's mind, and
there contended for some brief instants: but as the last stroke sounded all
the crystal vials shivered with a stunning crash, and their hellish
inmates, rejoicing in their deliverance, swarmed into the chamber. All made
for the youth, who, tugged, clawed, fondled, bitten, beslimed, blinded,
deafened, beset in every way by creatures of indescribable loathsomeness,
grasped frantically as his sole weapon, the stylus; but it had become a
writhing serpent. This was too much, sense forsook him on the spot.

On recovering consciousness he found himself stretched on a pallet in t