this inn seemed to promise murder; or so the young man's intuition
said, and the young are wise to trust to their intuitions.

The reader will know, if he be one of us, who have been to the
wars and slept in curious ways, that it is hard to sleep when
sober upon a floor; it is not like the earth, or snow, or a
feather bed; even rock can be more accommodating; it is hard,
unyielding and level, all night unmistakable floor. Yet Rodriguez
took no risk of falling asleep, so he said over to himself in his
mind as much as he remembered of his treasured book, Notes in a
Cathedral, which he always read to himself before going to rest
and now so sadly missed. It told how a lady who had listened to a
lover longer than her soul's safety could warrant, as he played
languorous music in the moonlight and sang soft by her low
balcony, and how she being truly penitent, had gathered many
roses, the emblems of love (as surely, she said at confession, all
the world knows), and when her lover came again by moonlight had
cast them all from her from the balcony, showing that she had
renounced love; and her lover had entirely misunderstood her. It
told how she often tried to show him this again, and all the
misunderstandings are sweetly set forth and with true Christian
penitence. Sometimes some little matter escaped Rodriguez's memory
and then he longed to rise up and look at his dear book, yet he
lay still where he was: and all the while he listened to the rats,
and the rats went on gnawing and running regularly, scared by
nothing new; Rodriguez trusted as much to their myriad ears as to
his own two. The great spiders descended out of such heights that
you could not see whence they came, and ascended again into
blackness; it was a chamber of prodigious height. Sometimes the
shadow of a descending spider that had come close to the candle