stroy, thee,--if, indeed, as it seems to me,
Death has not already written 'mine' upon thee."

"Raven of bode and woe!" answered Adrian, "seest thou not that all
I shrink from is thy voice and aspect? Show me her I seek, living or
dead."

"I will show her to you, then," said the Becchino, sullenly, "such as
two nights since she was committed to my charge. Line and lineament may
already be swept away, for the Plague hath a rapid besom; but I have
left that upon her by which you will know the Becchino is no liar. Bring
hither the torches, comrades, and lift the door. Never stare; it's the
gentleman's whim, and he'll pay it well."

Turning to the right while Adrian mechanically followed his conductors,
a spectacle whose dire philosophy crushes as with a wheel all the pride
of mortal man--the spectacle of that vault in which earth hides all that
on earth flourished, rejoiced, exulted--awaited his eye!

The Becchini lifted a ponderous grate, lowered their torches (scarcely
needed, for through the aperture rushed, with a hideous glare, the light
of the burning sun,) and motioned to Adrian to advance. He stood upon
the summit of the abyss and gazed below.

It was a large deep and circular space, like the bottom of an exhausted
well. In niches cut into the walls of earth around, lay, duly coffined,
those who had been the earliest victims of the plague, when the
Becchino's market was not yet glutted, and priest followed, and friend
mourned the dead. But on the floor below, there was the loathsome
horror! Huddled and matted together--some naked, some in shrouds already
black and rotten--lay the later guests, the unshriven and unblest! The
torches, the sun, streamed broad and red over Corruption in all its
stages, from the pale blue tint and swollen shape, to the moistened
undistinguishable mass, or the riddled bones, where yet clung, in strips
and tatters, the black and mangled flesh. In many, the face remained
almost perfect, while the rest of the body was but bone; the long hair,
the human face, surmounting the grisly skeleton. There was the infant,
still on the mother's breast; there was the lover, stretched across the
dainty limbs of his adored! The rats, (for they clustered in numbers to
that feast,) disturbed, not scared, sate up from their horrid meal as
the light glimmered over them, and thousands of them lay round, stark,
and dead, poisoned by that they fed on! There, too, the wild satire of
the gravediggers had cas