skull below
  ’Twixt nape and brain.  Tydeus, as stories show,
  Thus to the brain of Menalippus ate:—­
  “O thou!” I cried, “showing such bestial hate
  To him thou tearest, read us whence it rose;
  That, if thy cause be juster than thy foe’s,
  The world, when I return, knowing the truth,
  May of thy story have the greater ruth.”

  His mouth he lifted from his dreadful fare,
  That sinner, wiping it with the grey hair
  Whose roots he had laid waste; and thus he said:—­
  “A desperate thing thou askest; what I dread
  Even to think of.  Yet, to sow a seed
  Of infamy to him on whom I feed,
  Tell it I will:—­ay, and thine eyes shall see
  Mine own weep all the while for misery. 
  Who thou may’st be, I know not; nor can dream
  How thou cam’st hither; but thy tongue doth seem
  To skew thee, of a surety, Florentine. 
  Know then, that I was once Count Ugoline,
  And this man was Ruggieri, the archpriest. 
  Still thou may’st wonder at my raging feast;
  For though his snares be known, and how his key
  He turn’d upon my trust, and murder’d me,
  Yet what the murder was, of what strange sort
  And cruel, few have had the true report. 
  Hear then, and judge.—­In the tower, called since then
  The Tower of Famine, I had lain and seen
  Full many a moon fade through the narrow bars. 
  When, in a dream one night, mine evil stars
  Shew’d me the future with its dreadful face. 
  Methought this man led a great lordly chase
  Against a wolf and cubs, across the height
  Which barreth Lucca from the Pisan’s sight. 
  Lean were the hounds, high-bred, and sharp for blood;
  And foremost in the press Gualandi rode,
  Lanfranchi, and Sismondi.  Soon were seen
  The father and his sons, those wolves I mean,
  Limping, and by the hounds all crush’d and torn
  And as the cry awoke me in the morn,
  I heard my boys, the while they dozed in bed
  (For they were with me), wail, and ask for bread. 
  Full cruel, if it move thee not, thou art,
  To think what thoughts then rush’d into my heart. 
  What wouldst thou weep at, weeping not at this? 
  All had now waked, and something seem’d amiss,
  For ’twas the time they used to bring us bread,
  And from our dreams had grown a horrid dread. 
  I listen’d; and a key, down stairs, I heard
  Lock up the dreadful turret.  Not a word
  I spoke, but look’d my children in the face
  No tear I shed, so firmly did I brace
  My soul; but they did; and my Anselm said,
  ‘Father, you look so!—­Won’t they bring us bread?’
  E’en then I wept not, nor did answer word
  All day, nor the next night.  And now was stirr’d,
  Upon the world without, another day;
  And of its light there came a little ray,
  Which mingled with the gloom of our sad jail;
  And looking to my children’s bed,