The interior was impressive for size despite all the scrolled and writhed and gilded mud pies with which Ferdinand Fuga, the Neapolitan, had plastered it by way of decoration, and here and there still lingered things worth seeing. Such as the delicious bas reliefs of Gagini, Sicily’s greatest native sculptor; his statues of the Apostles and the fine old choir stalls, only making clearer by their ancient beauty how much that was beautiful had been swept away. Also there was the splendid silver sarcophagus of Santa Rosalia, weighing more than a thousand pounds, and other such matters, but 250the real attraction of the Cathedral was the great porphyry tombs of the Kings—huge coffers of ensanguined stone, as massive and tremendous as the mummy cases of the Pharaohs. Here lay Roger the King in the sternest and plainest of them, under a fretted Gothic canopy. In one more ornate, his daughter Constance, and near at hand her husband Henry VI. of Germany, and their son, the Emperor Frederick the Second. Jane and Peripatetica longed that Constance, like Hamlet’s Father might “ope those ponderous and marble jaws” and come forth to tell them the real story of her strange life. For she too had been one of those hapless feminine pawns used so recklessly in the game of kingdoms played by the men about her; yet a whisper still lingered that this pawn had not been always passive, but had reached out her white hand and lifted the king from the board, and thus altered the whole course of the game!