First the visitors were led by the bachelor brothers to see the huge old mansion, which they called the _Palazzo_. Let no one who has seen an ordinary Genoese palace, magnificent with gilding, enriched by priceless pictures, supplied with choice books, and adorned with gorgeous furniture, figure to himself any such combination in the _palazzo_ in question. This was a vast pile of building, that would make five moderate-sized dwelling-houses, one in the roof, and the other four in the habitable portion of the edifice. A general air of ramshackledness pervaded the exterior, while the interior presented an effect of interminable ranges of white-washed walls, divided off into numberless apartments of various sizes, from a saloon on the _piano nobile_, or principal floor, measuring more than forty feet long, to small square attic rooms that were little more than cupboards. But this attic story was not all composed of chambers thus dimensioned. Among its apartments were rooms that might have accommodated a banqueting assemblage, had diners been so inclined; while among the accommodations comprised in this garret range was a kitchen, with spacious dressers, stoves, closets, and a well of water some hundred and odd feet deep. It was impossible for the imagination to refrain from picturing the troops of ghosts which doubtless occupied these upper chambers of the old _palazzo_, and held nightly vigil, undisturbed, amid the silence and solitude of their neglected spaces. Through one of the dwarf windows that pierced at intervals all sides of the mansion, just beneath the lofty roof, and which gave light to the attic story, we were directed to look by the emphatic words of the elder bachelor brother,--"Ma, veda che vista c' e!"