table in the middle of the room between two candles,
with which the servant had made her appearance. While the friends,
whose number increased hourly, stood by, wringing their hands, and in
scattered groups, and speechless with grief, looked at their quiet
ghost-like proceedings, they seated themselves down at the table, as if
their senses were closed to every other object, and folding their
hands, began their devotions. They neither desired the repast, which
the servant brought in to regale their companions, according to the
orders they had left in the morning, nor afterwards, when night
advanced, did they care for the couch which she had set up in the
adjoining room, because they appeared weary. The friends, that they
might not provoke the anger of the host, who seemed much surprised at
the whole proceeding, sat down to a side-table profusely covered, and
ate the viands, which had been prepared for a large party, salting them
at the same time with their tears. The hour of midnight now suddenly
struck, and your four sons, after listening for a moment to the dull
sound of the bell, rose from their seats with a simultaneous movement,
and while we, laying down our napkins, looked at them, anxious to know
what would follow so strange a commencement, they began to sing the
_Gloria in excelsis_ in the most hideous and horrible voice. The sound
of leopards and wolves, when on an icy winters night they roar at the
sky, may be something like it. The pillars of the house, I assure you,
were shaken, and the window-panes smitten by the visible breath from
their lungs, rattled and threatened to fall in, as if handfuls of heavy
sand were dashed against their surface. At this frightful sight we
lost all self-possession, and with hair erect, we darted off in
different directions. Leaving hats and cloaks behind us, we dispersed
through the neighbouring streets, which in a short time were filled,
not with us, but with more than a hundred men who had been awakened
from sleep. The people bursting open the hall-door hurried upstairs to
the room, to discover the source of these fearful and revolting howls,
which seemed to implore the divine mercy, as if from the lips of
condemned sinners in the deepest abyss of the infernal regions. At
last when the clock struck one, the brothers, without having listened
to the indignation of the host, or the exclamations of horror that were
uttered by the people, closed their lips, wiped with a han