knew by heart, and which was my delight under the
Leads. I idolized the genius of Ariosto, and considered him a far better
fortune-teller than Virgil.

With this idea I wrote a question addressed to the supposed Intelligence,
in which I ask in what canto of Ariosto I should find the day of my
deliverance. I then made a reversed pyramid composed of the number formed
from the words of the question, and by subtracting the number nine I
obtained, finally, nine. This told me that I should find my fate in the
ninth canto. I followed the same method to find out the exact stanza and
verse, and got seven for the stanza and one for the verse.

I took up the poem, and my heart beating as if I trusted wholly in the
oracle, I opened it, turned down the leaf, and read;

'Fra il fin d'ottobre, a il capo di novembre'.

The precision of the line and its appropriateness to my circumstances
appeared so wonderful to me, that I will not confess that I placed my
faith entirely in it; but the reader will pardon me if I say that I did
all in my power to make the prediction a correct one. The most singular
circumstance is that between the end of October and the beginning of
November, there is only the instant midnight, and it was just as the
clock was striking midnight on the 31st of October that I escaped from my
cell, as the reader will soon see.

The following is the manner in which I passed the morning to strike awe
into the soul of that vicious brute, to confound his feeble intellect,
and to render him harmless to me.

As soon as Lawrence had left us I told Soradaci to come and take some
soup. The scoundrel was in bed, and he had told Lawrence that he was ill.
He would not have dared to approach me if I had not called him. However,
he rose from his bed, and threw himself flat upon the ground at my feet,
and said, weeping violently, that if I would not forgive him he would die
before the day was done, as he already felt the curse and the vengeance
of the Holy Virgin which I had denounced against him. He felt devouring
pains in his bowels, and his mouth was covered with sores. He shewed it
me, and I saw it was full of ulcers, but I cannot say whether it was thus
the night before. I did not much care to examine him to see if he were
telling me the truth. My cue was to pretend to believe him, and to make
him hope for mercy. I began by making him eat and drink. The traitor most
likely intended to deceive me, but as I was myself determined