was, besides, at a greater distance from my family, and no longer received any tidings from them. The new faces which I saw did not create in me antipathy; but there was a seriousness upon them which caused me alarm. Report had exaggerated the plots of the Milanese, and the rest of Italy, to achieve independence. In their eyes I was, doubtless, one of the least worthy of pardon among the instigators of this frenzy. My slight literary celebrity was known to the jailer, to his wife, his daughter, his two sons, even to the two secondini. Who knows but they looked upon a maker of tragedies as a species of magician? They were grave, distrustful, eager to learn every thing connected with me, but at the same time full of politeness.

After a certain period they were less reserved and appeared good enough people. The woman was the best calculated to maintain the air and character of a jailer. Her visage was of a peculiarly-harsh expression, bearing the marks of forty years or thereabouts; her words were few; and she gave no symptoms of benevolence, but for her own sons.

She was accustomed to bring my coffee in the morning and after dinner, as well as water, linen, etc. She was generally accompanied by her daughter, a girl of fifteen, who was not pretty, but who had compassion in her looks.

and by her two sons, of whom one was thirteen and the other ten. They retired, following their mother, and turned their young countenances mildly toward me as the door was closing. The jailer never entered my room except when he had to conduct me to the hall, where the commission met to interrogate me. The secondini rarely came, as they had to take charge of the prisons of the police, situated a story below, where there were always plenty of robbers. One of these secondini was an old man of seventy years of age, but still quite fit for so fatiguing a life, which consists in running without relief from one cell to another, first up stairs and then down; the other was a young man, twenty-four or twenty-five years old.

My examinations were now renewed. I was distracted with the questions put to me, and the suspicions entertained of my motives. I should have been driven mad, but for the consolations of religion.

My loneliness, in the mean time, increased. The two sons of the jailer, who at first occasionally visited me, were sent to school, and remaining afterward only a short time at home, came to see me no more. The mother and daughter, who, when the boys were there, often stopped to talk with me, appeared only to bring my coffee, and immediately retired. For the mother I

cared little, as she did not show much compassion; but the daughter had a softness in her looks and words which was not without value to me. When she brought my coffee, and said, “I have made it myself," I was sure to find it excellent; when she said, "It is mamma's," it was hot water.

Seeing human creatures so rarely, I turned my attention to some ants which came upon my window, and I fed them so sumptuously, that they brought a whole army of their companions, and my window was soon filled. I occupied myself likewise with a spider, which spun its web on one of the walls; I gave it gnats and flies, and it became so familiar as to come upon my bed and into my hand to seize its prey.

Would that these insects had been the only ones to visit me! It was yet spring, and the gnats increased frightfully in numbers. The winter had been peculiarly mild, and after some winds in March, the heat came on. It is not possible to imagine how heated the air in my den became; placed to the south under a leaden roof, with a window opening to the roof of St. Mark, likewise of lead, the refraction was terrific. I could scarcely breathe. I had no idea of a heat so overpowering. To this torment, in itself so sufficient, were added such swarms of gnats, that if I made the least movement, and

disturbed them, I was completely covered-the bed, the table, the chair, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the whole room was filled with them-a countless multitude, which went and came through the window with an intolerable buzzing. The bites of these insects are very painful; and when one is punctured with them from morning to night, and from night to morning, and the attention is incessantly occupied in devising means to lessen the infliction, there is enough of suffering, in all conscience, for both mind and body.

When I found by experience the misery of this visitation, and could not obtain a change of room, I felt arise within me once more an inclination for suicide, and sometimes I feared I should become mad. But, thanks to God, such frenzies did not last long, and religion continued to sustain me. It convinced me that man ought to suffer, and to suffer with firmness; it made me feel in my grief a certain joy, a voluptuous satisfaction in not being vanquished, in rising superior to every evil.

To strengthen and occupy my mind, I conceived the idea of committing my thoughts to writing. The misfortune was, that the commission, in granting me pen, ink, and paper, ordered the sheets to be counted, and prohibited me from destroying any, reserving to themselves

the right of examining to what use I had applied them. To supply the want of paper I had recourse to the innocent artifice of polishing with a piece of glass a rough table that I had, and there I recorded every day my lengthy meditations upon the duties of mankind, and especially upon my own.

I do not exaggerate when I say that the hours thus occupied appeared to me delightful, in spite of the difficulty I experienced in breathing, from the excessive heat, and the painful stings of the gnats. To diminish the number of these, I was compelled, notwithstanding the heat, to envelop my head and limbs, and to write not only with gloves, but my wrists bandaged, so as to prevent the little animals from getting up the sleeves.

These meditations of mine took a biographical form. I composed the history of every thing that had operated for good or for evil within me since my infancy. I discussed questions within myself, ascertained, as far as practicable, all my knowledge and all my ideas upon every matter.

When all the disposable surface of the table was covered with writing, I read and re-read, I meditated upon my own meditations; and at last I resolved, often with regret, to scratch out with the glass what I had written, so as to render the surface fit to receive the fresh im