six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on closer
inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of human
bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned from the
grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering; but here!--Why,
heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so good-naturedly,--so many
men have died and passed away with their difficult, ambitious, and
troublesome little schemes,--and the great mass of mankind is taken so
small account of in the course of destiny, that the idea of death does not
appear so alien and repulsive as elsewhere, and the presence of such
evidences of our poor mortality can scarcely offend sensibility. These
were doubtless the bones of the good Servite friars who had been buried in
their convent, and had been digged up to make way for certain improvements
now taking place within its walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were
a rest to their bodies, to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all
in their lives like those who have come after them, the sun baked their
bald brows in Summer, and their naked feet--poor feet! clapping round in
wooden-soled sandals over the frozen stones of Venice--were swollen and
gnawed with chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their
number, looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his
nose, came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread
and fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct
wished to see him.

The friars' skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty
manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the
enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits, I
suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused and
shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so
corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth.
People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for indigent