themselves.  There was not, I am bound to say, one of those women who did not hear Mass three times a week, recite the daily rosary, confess herself, take the sacrament.  Nor do I remember a single man of those whom I met in various houses of call or thieves-kitchens in the town who was without his mental activity of some honest kind, who had not a shrewd interest in politics, a passion for this or that science—­ as botany, mineralogy, or optics, or an appreciation keenly critical of the fine arts.  Philosophers, too, some of them were, acute reasoners, sophists, casuists.  We had no doubts, fears or suspicions of them, and they thought no evil of us.  Some of them we invited to a reading in our tower; and once we enacted the “Aminta” with great applause:  Beltramo, a very engaging boy (afterwards hanged for highway robbery and prison-breaking), Violante, an unfrocked priest called Il Corvo, Virginia and I took parts.  Beltramo I never saw again but once, and that against my will.  I saw him hanged at Genoa in 1742.  A curious life indeed, which, to one so addicted to research into the ways of men as I always was, would have needed violence for its termination.  Violence, indeed, did end it, and with humiliating detail.

One day I sold my cloak to buy a book.  That was a vellum-bound copy of the Sonnets of Cino of Pistoja, which, with my autograph, “Fr. Strelleius—­Pistoriae—­IV Kal.  Aug.  MDCCXXII,” I still possess in my present retreat at Lucca.  Cino had been a famous poet in his day, the lover of the beautifully named Selvaggia Vergiolesi, who had, in fact, lived in our romantic tower.  I thought that the opportunity of becoming acquainted, on the very spot, with the mind of a man who must so often have sighed and sung upon it was well worth an unnecessary garment.  The volume mine, and a few pence besides, I purchased bread, wine and sausage, and made Virginia a feast.  We banqueted first on sausage, next on poetry, and revelled so late in the latter that we exhausted our stock of candle, and had none left for the exigencies or possibilities of the night.  Tired out and in the dark we sought our proper ends of the long room.  I, who lay below the window, immediately fell into a deep sleep.

I was awakened by a dream of suffocation, imprisonment and loss, to find that of such pains I was literally a sufferer.  A thick woollen was over my mouth and nose, the knees of some monstrous heavy man were on my chest, cords were being circled and knotted about my hands and arms.  My feet were already bound so fast that the slightest movement of them was an agony.  Dumb, blind, bound, what could I do but lie where I was?  The work was done swiftly, in the pitchy dark, and in silence so profound that I could hear Virginia’s even breathing, separated as she was from me by the length of a long floor.  There was but one effort I could make with my tied ankles, and that was to raise both legs together and bring the heels down with a thud upon the boards.  The cords cut me to the bone—­the effect upon Virginia was precisely nothing.