To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault. Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained, was a stream with waterfalls. Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale, full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano; "singular!--just our coming hour!" How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive, with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners; the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.