In these, our own latter days, when the world at large is recovering somewhat from the prolonged epidemic of materialism from which it had been suffering during the greater part of the Nineteenth Century, the fact of supernatural “possession” is coming to be recognised by many of the strongest scientific intellects as the only possible and rational explanation of certain among the numerous cases of mental perversity that fill our modern prisons and asylums. Even—so I have been given to understand—the “Salpêtrière” itself has been known to express opinions favourable to the theory of possession in some instances. So that the story of Eustochia may not be deemed to be unworthy of attention—even by those persons who ordinarily find it difficult to believe anything unless it has already received the endorsement of their fellow-creatures’ belief. The natural daughter of a dissolute citizen of Terra di Gemola in the Veneto, Lucrezia was born in shame and secrecy in the year 1444, at Padua, and was sent at once to her father, Bartolomeo Bellini, at Gemola. Bartolomeo Bellini was, alas! a married man with a lawful wife and family of his own; none the less, he received the child with some show of gladness and immediately saw to her being properly baptised, giving her the name of Lucrezia; after which he handed her over to a nurse under whose care the little Lucrezia remained until she was four years old, when Bellini sent for her to come and live with him and his family in his own house. By this time she had become very pretty, as well as being already endowed with considerable charm and brightness of spirit. On seeing her again, her father came to love Lucrezia with an especial tenderness; but, to his wife, not unnaturally, the sight of the little girl was gall and bitterness, in its reminder of her husband’s infidelity to her; and the Signora Bellini soon grew to hate the presence of Lucrezia. Nor were Bellini’s own good sentiments towards his daughter suffered to endure for long. It seemed to those with whom she was in daily and hourly contact that there was something odd about Lucrezia; for all her charm and goodness, the child, in some indefinable way, was not as other children, but rather as one mysteriously marked down by Providence for some especial purpose of Its own.