TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL. SIX ROMANTIC STORIES. BY JAMES PLATT, JUNIOR. _PRICE ONE SHILLING._ LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., 4 STATIONERS' HALL COURT. 1894. _Entered at Stationers' Hall_] [_All Rights Reserved._ CONTENTS. THE SEVEN SIGILS THE HAND OF GLORY THE RABBI LION THE EVIL EYE THE WITCHES' SABBATH THE DEVIL'S DEBT THE SEVEN SIGILS. PART I. BRAVO AND POISONER. The Bottomless Lake of our Legend was reputed an outlet of the Bottomless Pit. No creature of our world had ever swum its lethal ebb and flow, but on the nights of the great Sabbaths, when the wizardry of all Italy swept to its beetling cliffs as to their Holiest of Holies, its waters eructed to the rendezvous the retinue of Hell--the wealth of an argosy would not have tempted a Lombard to venture within eye-shot of it after nightfall. Who, then, are these two men of mortal mould that outstare the depths of the Bottomless Lake itself, and not only that but from the very horns of the Altar of the Black Mass, and not only that, but at the witching hour forsooth of night, when graveyards yawn, and the everlasting doors of Tophet open wide? Their guardian angels of good have surely turned from their right hands, and their evil guardians of the left are grinning from horn to horn. With the chime of twelve from the distant steeple dies out the last echo of admonition, and they begin to work out such unhallowed errand as alone can have brought them to so damned a spot; the elder of the two in a tone of hushed solemnity addresses a series of questions to the younger, who responds to them with an equally awful gravity, after the manner of a catechism. "Dost know me who I am?" "Tosca of Venice, bravo and poisoner." "And Yourself?" "Janko the Illyrian, bravo with a right good will, but not yet poisoner." "My ancestry?" "Sorcerer stock, whose secrets you would fain have inherited and their trade pursued." "Why did I not?" "The Council of Ten bore down upon your race, and but for your extreme youth you yourself would have crossed the Bridge of Sighs. Orphaned by the State, and retaining for sole inheritance the swashing blade that still gnaws at your scabbard, and a few recipes for poisons (which last, however, were worth a Borgia's envy), you soon found yourself compelled to use both the one and the other to buy you bed and board. Proceeding at first with hesitancy, and never sojourning long in one locality, you became by degrees the repository of so many family secrets that at the present day you may stalk assured through the length and breadth of Italy, and ruffle it in what company you will." "And your own story?"