But now I must tell you something the old miscreant meant when he said this, and pointed down below the great table, which else might be hard to understand. For this great table stood over a trap or well-hole in the floor, and this well-hole went straight down to the dungeons under the Castle, where, if all tales told were true, there was still living a very old man who was first incarcerated forty years since, and had lived on, God knows how! And others as well, though little was known of them by those above in the daylight. But this old man had made some talk, seeing that he was first confined there in the days of the old Duke, our Duke's father, a just man and well-beloved, for a crime committed near by, on the evidence of his wife and his brother. Of whom, having lived some while _par amours_, the brother having died by poison, and the woman having died in sanctity as Mother Superior of the nuns of Monte Druscolo in Umbria, it was known that the latter made confession on her death-bed that her paramour was truly, but unknown to her, the author of the crime for which his brother was condemned. Now, this came to her knowledge by a chance, later. On which she, learning with resentment the concealment of this from herself; and seeing that the victim of this crime had been a young girl under her care and charge, had compassed the death of the real culprit for justice' sake, but had not thought it well to proclaim the truth about her husband's innocence, for she might have found it hard to look him in the face. So he was left where he was, the more that it was thought he might die if brought out into the sun; and, indeed, he was very old, and the Holy Abbess in extreme old age when she made her confession. But he is not in my tale, nor she, and I speak of him only because of the chance by which he made known to me the existence of this same well-hole beneath my lord's dining-table. For it was the telling of this story at the banquet that caused it to be spoken of, and also how in old days its use was to be opened after the meal, that the guests might of their _gentilezza_ throw what they had not cared to eat themselves to the prisoners below. And the Prince Cosmo dei Medici, who was graciously present, was pleased to say it would have been a pretty tale for Boccaccio--or perhaps even the great Lodovico Ariosto might not scorn to try his hand upon it?