The Becchini lifted a ponderous grate, lowered their torches (scarcely needed, for through the aperture rushed, with a hideous glare, the light of the burning sun,) and motioned to Adrian to advance.  He stood upon the summit of the abyss and gazed below.

It was a large deep and circular space, like the bottom of an exhausted well.  In niches cut into the walls of earth around, lay, duly coffined, those who had been the earliest victims of the plague, when the Becchino’s market was not yet glutted, and priest followed, and friend mourned the dead.  But on the floor below, there was the loathsome horror!  Huddled and matted together—­some naked, some in shrouds already black and rotten—­lay the later guests, the unshriven and unblest!  The torches, the sun, streamed broad and red over Corruption in all its stages, from the pale blue tint and swollen shape, to the moistened undistinguishable mass, or the riddled bones, where yet clung, in strips and tatters, the black and mangled flesh.  In many, the face remained almost perfect, while the rest of the body was but bone; the long hair, the human face, surmounting the grisly skeleton.  There was the infant, still on the mother’s breast; there was the lover, stretched across the dainty limbs of his adored!  The rats, (for they clustered in numbers to that feast,) disturbed, not scared, sate up from their horrid meal as the light glimmered over them, and thousands of them lay round, stark, and dead, poisoned by that they fed on!  There, too, the wild satire of the gravediggers had cast, though stripped of their gold and jewels, the emblems that spoke of departed rank;—­the broken wand of the Councillor; the General’s baton; the Priestly Mitre!  The foul and livid exhalations gathered like flesh itself, fungous and putrid, upon the walls, and the—­

But who shall detail the ineffable and unimaginable horrors that reigned over the Palace where the Great King received the prisoners whom the sword of the Pestilence had subdued?

But through all that crowded court—­crowded with beauty and with birth, with the strength of the young and the honours of the old, and the valour of the brave, and the wisdom of the learned, and the wit of the scorner, and the piety of the faithful—­one only figure attracted Adrian’s eye.  Apart from the rest, a latecomer—­the long locks streaming far and dark over arm and breast—­lay a female, the face turned partially aside, the little seen not recognisable even by the mother of the dead,—­but wrapped round in that fatal mantle, on which, though blackened and tarnished, was yet visible the starry heraldry assumed by those who claimed the name of the proud Tribune of Rome.  Adrian saw no more—­he fell back in the arms of the gravediggers:  when he recovered, he was still without the gates of Florence—­reclined upon a green mound—­his guide stood beside him—­holding his steed by the bridle as it grazed patiently on the neglected grass.  The other brethren of the axe had resumed their seat under the shed.