Metella tombs raised one above the other than of an ordinary tower; and it was oddly distributed within. A staircase wound in the centre of the building, communicating with the rooms on each tier by a circular corridor on which the doors opened; but from the third floor this staircase ceased, and from that to the fourth there was no access except from a winding stair within the thickness of the outer wall. The great stairs were of stone and uncarpeted, and in the corridor on which the doors of the rooms opened were placed at intervals pieces of furniture, such as chairs, tables, stands, bronzes, vases, marble cornices, things picturesque, but not always available for use, and many sadly injured and mutilated, yet forming such a collection as sent a thrill of envy to the heart of a few stray connoisseurs who had come across it and never been able to bring away even a specimen. Old Salviani had his superstitions, but, unlike his countrymen in general, he felt that these forbade him to sell anything belonging to the old family seat, especially to a foreigner. One day two travellers stopped at the hotel, a mother and daughter—“English, of course,” said the landlord with a smile, as he saw their costume and independent air. The daughter was, equally of course, in evident and irrepressible raptures about everything she saw in the place, from the ruinous outhouses to the museum-like interior. Their own rooms on the first floor, large, marble-paved, and scantily but artistically furnished with the best preserved of the antique things, satisfied them only for a short time; they wanted to be shown over the whole house. The bedrooms were not quite in such good taste, they thought; and indeed, as Salviani was not perfect, here the “cloven foot” _did_ appear, for a peddler had once beguiled him into buying some Nottingham lace curtains with which he disfigured one of the third-story rooms, and some cheap chintzes which he had made into curtains for some of the patched-up bedsteads. But as the two strangers went up through each corridor, looking down at the tier below and at the various beautiful things beside them, they forgot these blemishes in their delight at a sight so unusual as this large, inhabited, well-preserved tower. They had seen nothing like it and could never have imagined it. It had an air of dignity, of grandeur, of repose, and yet of connection with the present to which one is more accustomed in old English country-houses than in Italian palaces.