rty yellow colour
spreading over his face, and that he was mixing up all sorts of
incoherent nonsense in his talk. When we reached the Square he reeled about
like a drunken man, until he fell to the ground in front of the Ducal
Palace--dead. With a loud wail I threw myself upon the corpse. The people
came running round us, but as soon as the dreaded cry 'The pestilence!
the pestilence!' was heard, they scattered and flew apart in terror. At the
same moment I was seized by a dull numbing pain, and my senses left me.

"When I awoke I found I was in a spacious room, lying on a plain
mattress, and covered with a blanket. Round about me there were fully
twenty or thirty other pale ghastly forms lying on similar mattresses.
As I learned later, certain compassionate monks, who happened to be
just coming out of St. Mark's, had, on finding signs of life in me, put
me in a gondola and got me taken over to Giudecca into the monastery
of San Giorgio Maggiore, where the Benedictines had established a
hospital. How can I describe to you, old woman, this moment of
re-awakening? The violence of the plague had completely robbed me of
all recollections of the past. Just as if the spark of life had been
suddenly dropped into a lifeless statue, I had but a momentary kind
of existence, so to speak, linked on to nothing. You may imagine
what trouble, what distress this life occasioned me in which my
consciousness seemed to swim in empty space without an anchorage. All
that the monks could tell me was that I had been found beside Father
Bluenose, whose son I was generally accounted to be. Gradually and
slowly I gathered my thoughts together, and tried to reflect upon my
previous life, but what I have told you, old dame, is all that I can
remember of it, and that consists only of certain individual
disconnected pictures. Oh! this miserable being-alone-in-the-world! I
can't be gay and happy, no matter what may happen!" "Tonino, my dear
Tonino," said the old woman, "be contented with what the present moment
gives you."

"Say no more, old woman, say no more," interrupted Antonio; "there is
still something else which embitters my life, following me about
incessantly everywhere; I know it will be the utter ruin of me in the
end. An unspeakable longing,--a consuming aspiration for something,--I
can neither say nor even conceive what it is--has taken complete
possession of my heart and mind since I awoke to renewed life in the
hospital. Whilst I wa