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T is just half a century since I closed the eyes of my good father—the best of comrades, the fondest of husbands, the most honest Venetian of his time. Ah, if you had known my father, you would have acknowledged him the hardiest, boldest fellow in the Republic, the cleverest mandolin-player, the best singer of Tasso, the smartest gondolier whose oars ever lashed to foam the waters of the Canalazzo. All this must be my excuse for rescuing from the oblivion of the fleeting years the fragment of his life I now relate.

My father felt his end approaching. With closed eyes he lay on a couch stuffed with maize-straw, a rosary in his wrinkled hands, and his pale lips moving in silent prayer. A death-like stillness filled the room, broken only by the sobs of wife and children. The rays of the evening sun burst through the vine-espalier that grew round our home; and over the face of the dying passed now patches of rosy light, and now the shadows of the broad leaves. Presently he opened the large, black, deeply-sunken eyes once more, looked slowly round as if to make sure that we were all there, and then began wearily and with difficulty to speak.

"For years, now," he said, "I have been wanting to make you the confidants of a strange, almost incredible, event which happened to me in my youth. I put it off from day to day, for one reason or another—but I put it off too long. Now, I know not whether the time that is left me suffices for the telling of this long-guarded secret. Listen, however—but first swear on this dying hand that no word of the secret shall pass your lips till fifty years have gone. The heir of a great and powerful family has been involved in the destiny of so humble a man as myself—and the Tribunal of the Inquisition was compelled to intervene. An unguarded word may expose you to the vengeance of an undisciplined and powerful nobility, or to the severity of the legal authorities. Swear, therefore, a silence of fifty years!"

We obeyed the last command of our father: we laid our hands in his, and pronounced the binding oath. We have kept it faithfully—my mother and sisters till their death; I, the last surviving, till the period assigned has expired, and the time arrived when I have to fear neither the vengeance of the nobles nor the tyranny of the Council of Ten; but to the point.

"It was at three o'clock on a sultry summer afternoon"—began my father—"that I sat myself down at the base of the granite pillar which supports the saintly Teodoro, and stretched my lazy limbs on the stone slabs below it. I fell to counting, with sleepy eyes, the pillars of the Doge's Palace, up and down, then down and up; miscounted them,