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Rh dependents still lingered amid the lonely walls; they died too; and for years the deserted palace had been left to the bird, the insect, and the weed. The bat and the owl made it their home, the spider wove its dreary tapestry, the grass made its way through the tessellated floors, the moss grew over the untrodden pavement, and the ivy—the fragile and creeping ivy—was now the chief support of the battlements which it had overrun.

Fifteen years previous to the commencement of this narrative, a stranger far advanced in years had suddenly arrived in the neighbourhood, and had taken up his abode in the left wing, which part of the building was by some chance in a better state of preservation than the rest. There were none to dispute his place of refuge, whose principal attraction seemed to be a high tower yet remaining, where he could take his astronomical observations. It was soon ascertained that he subsisted on a moderate sum of money, lodged in the hands of a Lombard merchant, and that his habits were eccentric and unsocial to a degree that almost denoted an unsettled mind.

Francisco da Carrara was in reality one of those visionaries whose imagination gave its own fascination to science; he gazed on the stars with