The cover of an ancient tomb in the wood rolls away, and from the black pit rises a grisly skeleton. Six legs clatter and rattle like pie-pans; swords fall. It is the ghost of Rinaldo’s father. Christian Maid is really Rinaldo’s sister, he explains, carried off by Saracens in her childhood. Skeleton pulls down the cover of the tomb and retires to innocuous desuetude. Opportune entry of Orlando miraculously cured of 267his wounds. Rinaldo has an inspiration, and bestows upon Orlando the hand of the Christian Maid. All the tins of the kitchen tumble at once—everybody has fallen on every one else’s mail-clad bosom!... Dear Gaspero! It has been a wonderful day. A slow, fine rain falls. Vapours roll among the vapoury hills. It is just the day for the museum, and such a museum! Not one of those cold and formal mausoleums built by the modern world for the beauties of the dead past, but a fine old monastery of the Philippines with two cloistered cortile; with a long, closed gallery for the hanging of the pictures; with big refectories, ambulatories, and chapels for housing the sculpture, and with its little cells crammed with gold and silver work, with enamels, with embroideries, with jewels. A gracious casket for the treasures of old time. The rain is dripping softly into the open cloister, where the wet garlands of wisteria and heavy-clustered gold of the banksias are distilling their mingled fragrance in the damp air. The rain makes sweet tinklings in the old fountains and in the sculptured wellheads gathered in the court; on the cloister walls are grouped bas-reliefs—tinted Madonnas by Gagini; Greek fragments, stone vases standing on the floor, twisted columns, broken but lovely torsos. Indeed, it is not like a museum at all. No ticketed rigidity, no historical sequence—just treasures set about where the setting will best accord with and display their beauties. There is not even a catalogue to be had, which gives a delightful sense of freedom at 268first, but this has its drawbacks when Jane and Peripatetica come to the tomb of Aprilis in a side chamber, and wish to know something more of this sad little maid sculptured into the marble of the tomb’s sunken lid—wrapped in a straitly folded wimple, with slim crossed feet, and small head turned half aside; smiling innocently in the sleep which has lasted so long. Aprilis, whose April had never blossomed into May, and whose epitaph has for five hundred years called Sicily to witness the grief of those who lost her: “Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda Puella Unicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 Otobre XIII 1495.” Of course, the guide-books ignore her. Trust the guide-books to preserve a stony silence about anything of real human interest!...