Blindfolded and with the cord of infamy depending from his neck, the Bishop was led up to the fatal ladder amid deafening shouts of “Viva la forca e Masto Donato; Sant’ Antonio sia priato!” On reaching the top of the gallows, the hangman made fast the rope to the cross-tree, and then an assistant (_tirapiede_) from below adroitly pushed the unseeing prisoner into space, catching on to his legs meanwhile, whilst “Masto Donato” himself adroitly leaped from the gallows-top upon the prelate’s shoulder. With the hangman on his back, shouting aloud how much he was enjoying his ride upon a real bishop, and with the other ruffian clinging to his heels, Monsignore Natale swayed backwards and forwards amidst yells of execration and gratified hate on that hot August morning in front of the Church of the Carmine little more than one hundred years ago. His body was left on the gallows to be insulted by the mob throughout the long sweltering day, and then, stripped of all its clothing, was finally flung with other corpses of noble men and women into a charnel-house at Sant’ Alessio al Lavinaio. Who it was that placed this quaint little memorial to the murdered prelate in his cathedral church we know not; but here the speechless yet eloquent cherub tells Natale’s sad story of brutality and injustice to all who care to listen. Happily the spell of silence is at length broken, and the true history of that hateful era of crime, cruelty, lying, and intrigue is gradually being revealed; and the enemies of the Church in Italy learn with an astonishment, which is perhaps feigned, that in that glorious army of martyrs of 1799 more than one ecclesiastic of high rank suffered in the ill-starred and premature cause of Neapolitan liberty.