In the morning, the Abbess with her nuns came, at her request, to say farewell to Eustochia, kneeling about the bed in prayer for her, the while she thanked them, as she expressed it, “for all your long-suffering and patience with me.” After which she still found strength to ask their “pardon for all the bad examples I have given you and all the inconvenience and embarrassment of having me among you.” Then, having bidden them “_Arrivederci in Cielo_,” so affectionately as to wring the hearts of all who heard her, Eustochia, folding her hands upon her breast, fell asleep with a smile. Nor was it until some time had elapsed that they could bring themselves to believe that she was really dead. When Eustochia was laid out in the chapel, all the town flocked to do honour to the body, which, as we are told, exhaled a very sweet and noticeable fragrance. She was first buried in the cloister of the convent, where her remains were disinterred on November 16, 1472, in the presence of many witnesses, who testified to it that the body was still precisely as it had been in the moment of her death, perfectly incorrupt and supple and deliciously fragrant. In 1475, however, the coffin was transferred to the church and a marble monument raised above her resting-place; meanwhile, as though to mark the spot formerly hallowed by being the depository of Eustochia’s body, a spring of purest water burst up out of her first grave in the cloister; which spring became a famous resort for the sick, of whom multitudes recovered their health by drinking of it. CHAPTER XVII A SKETCH OF VERONA Personality of Italian Towns—Verona—Its History—Early Years—Ezzelino da Romano, Unique in Cruelty—Wholesale Execution and Imprisonment—Pope Alexander IV Assails the Monster—Ezzelino Wounded and Captured—Suicide—New Line of Despots—Cangrande della Scala—Dante and Petrarch—Further Lords of Verona—Later History—The Drei Kaiser Bund. Almost every ancient Italian town possesses some distinctive attribute of its own, whether of pure beauty or grandeur or sanctity; or, else, of mere gentle charm, gladsome or melancholy, such as Sorrento or Ravenna; but of them all perhaps the most richly endowed—Rome itself alone excepted—with stirring memories of the men and their deeds, good and bad, of bygone ages, is the city of Verona.