ong, and was carried by them out of his way. He askt a girl who was
passing quickly by him, what had set the whole town in such an
extraordinary commotion.

"Don't you know then?" answered she: "the beautiful Crescentia, the
young thing, is just going to be buried; everybody wishes to have one
more sight of her; for she has always been counted the sweetest maiden
in the whole city. Her parents are heartbroken." The last words she
called back to him, from some distance beyond him.

The stranger turned round the dark palace into the great street, and
his ears were now met by the funeral hymn, and his eyes by the
flickering light of the pale-red torches. On drawing nearer, pusht
forward by the crowding of the people, he saw a scaffold covered with
black cloth. Around it were raised seats, likewise black, on which the
sorrowing parents and relations were sitting, all in stern gloom, some
faces with the look of despair. Figures now began to move forth from
the door of the house; priests and black forms bore an open coffin,
out of which wreaths of flowers and green garlands were hanging down.

In the midst of the blooming gay plants lay the maidenly form raised
upon cushions, pale, in a white robe, her lovely slender hands folded
and holding a crucifix, her eyes closed, dark black tresses hanging
full and heavy round her head, on which a wreath of roses and cypress
and myrtle was gleaming.

The coffin with its beautiful corpse was placed upon the scaffold; the
priests cast themselves down to pray; the parents gave yet louder vent
to their grief; yet more wailing grew the sound of the hymns; and
everybody around, even the strangers, sobbed and wept. The traveller
thought he had never yet seen so lovely a creature, as this corpse
that thus mournfully reminded him how fleeting life is, how vain and
perishable its charms.

Now sounded the solemn tolling of the bells, and the bearers were on
the point of taking up the coffin, to carry the corpse into the
burial-vault of the great church, when loud riotous shouts of
exultation and pealing laughter and the cries of an unrestrained joy
disturbed and alarmed the parents and kinsfolk, the priests and
mourners. All lookt indignantly round, when out of the next street a
merry troop of young men came boisterously toward them, singing and
huzzaing, and evermore again and again crying a long life! to their
venerable teacher. They were the students of the university, carrying
an aged m