To make a long story short, I made several excursions to the cave in the same manner, and dug nearly the whole ground in a systematic way, leaving until the last a small alcove near the mouth of the cave, because I found very few tesseræ anywhere in the strong daylight. Everything which was not a simple, uninteresting piece of stone or shell I stowed away in a bag and carried to my studio. In a few Sundays I had a peck or more of tesseræ, a quarter of them glass ones, and a great many bits of twisted glass rod and small pieces of glass vessels. One day the spade turned out, among other things, several small pieces of brown, porous substance which looked in the dim light like decayed wood. I put them in the bag with the rest, to be examined at my leisure at home. The next morning, when I came to turn out the collection gathered the day before, these curious pieces fell out with the rest, and immediately attracted my attention. In the strong light of day, I saw at once what they were. They were the decayed phalanges of a human hand. The story of Tedesco and Rubina was always in my mind; and I compared the bones with my own fingers, and found them to be without doubt the bones of an adult, and probably of a man. I could scarcely wait for the next Sunday to arrive, but I did not dare to risk the descent of the cliff on a week-day lest I should be seen by the fishermen. When at last I did reach the cave again, I went at my work with vigor, continuing my search in the place where I left off the previous week. In a short time I unearthed several more bones similar to those I already had, but, although I thoroughly examined every cubic foot of earth which I had not previously dug over, I found no more of the skeleton. In my studio that evening I arranged the little bones as well as I could in the positions they had occupied in the human hand. As far as I could make out, I had the thumb, the first and third fingers and one joint of the second, three of the bones of the hand, and one of the wrist-bones. There could be no question but these had once belonged to a human hand, and to the right hand, too. There was no means of knowing how long ago the person had died, neither could there be any possible way of identifying these human relics. The possession of the grewsome little objects seemed to set my imagination on fire. After going to bed at night I often worked myself into a state of disagreeable nervous tension by meditating on the history of the sculptor, and revolving in my mind the theories I had formed of the mystery of his life and the manner of his death. For some reason the old woman had never told me where his studio had been, and it never occurred to me to ask her until the thought suddenly came during one of these night-hours of wakefulness. When I put the question to her the next afternoon, she replied, simply: “This studio was his, _signor padrone_.”