I saw no custode. The old woman, I fancied, sure that I was no thief, did not intend to disturb her siesta to look farther after me. So I walked slowly on, and passing up the grand stone-staircase in the cold hall, I entered the suite of state apartments. They were lofty and spacious. The ceilings were painted in fresco, and there was an unnatural freshness in the color, as if it was not the work of many years before. The windows were heavily and richly draped. The furniture was stately and costly, and the walls were tapestried. There was an oppressive air of cold regal magnificence in each apartment. There was nothing domestic; no pleasant disorder; no gentle confusion, as if children had just fled from the rooms; nothing that indicated a home; every thing that bespoke a ceremonial palace. Some of the walls were not tapestried, and upon them hung pictures—mainly portraits—soldiers in uniforms, and noblemen in robes, or dignified Italian ladies in the stiff fashions of dead centuries. At length I reached the state bed-chamber. In the centre of the room stood the bed, ascended by steps, and muffled in thick clustering draperies, covered with the crest of Sangrido. There was an oratory adjoining, with a massive silver crucifix and a carved priedieu. But my eyes clung with a painful curiosity to the solemnly-draped bed. The curtains were black, and folded over it like a heavy cloud; and as I gazed, the whole seemed to me to form a funeral catafalque. Through the thick glass of the windows, rimed with the gathered dust of years, and through the plain white muslin curtains that hung over them like shrouds, the light came sickly and thin, and the funeral drapery apparently thickened the air of the room. Instinctively I stepped to the window, but I could not open it, and it was so coated with obscurity that I could not look down into the sunny square. I listened for a sound, but there was nothing to hear. My own respiration was as audible as at midnight, and I turned back into the solemn chamber. Almost involuntarily, and as if drawn by an irresistible fascination, I climbed the steps that ascended to the bed, and laying hold of the heavy black curtains, pulled them aside and looked within them. There was nothing to be seen but a bed fairly made; the linen yellow, as with time. But as I looked up I saw something black hanging from the ring in the ceiling which held
