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"in what a condition you are leaving us? Here am I unable to leave my bed. Margherita is unwell. Barbara has the fever. And we have no one to help us." Lucia was inflexible. "Will you not wait till we have found another servant?”

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No, Signor, I cannot!" was the provoked girl's

answer.

"Go, then," rejoined her angry master, "wherever God may lead you!"

But Giovanni Sirani could not reconcile it to his conscience to let the girl go forth unprotected into the city wholly left to her own devices. And the steps he took to prevent this are curiously illustrative of the manners of the time. He sent for two men, who were related to the girl; and privately arranged with them, that they should tell her they had found her an excellent place with a worthy family, to which they would at once conduct her. The unsuspecting Lucia departed accordingly; and was led by them to "the Hospital of St. Gregory, called the Beggar's Home,” where she was forthwith shut up a prisoner! So that it should seem a master had the power to cause a girl guilty of nothing but having no home, to be thus imprisoned for her own protection: and yet that it was necessary to use a ruse to get her there!

The Sirani family were a good deal surprised at Lucia's determination to leave them just at the time she did. For it wanted only a few days of the annual fair held on the 24th of August. And a considerable item in the value of her place consisted in the presents which it was the custom to give her on this occasion. In the first year of her service Dame Margherita had given her a muff, and Elisabetta a couple of pauls. The next year the mistress had given her a shift, and

the Signorina a paul. And now, in the third year, she lost her fairings by abruptly going away just before the time when they were due.

This was the uncomfortable state of matters in the Sirani family in August 1665. Elisabetta herself had been for some time past out of her usual health. But with her ordinary invincible industry, she stuck to her work. With her father disabled by the gout, her sister Barbara also down with fever, and unable to earn anything, it was more than ever necessary that Elisabetta should take the labouring oar. And fortunately a fresh order for a picture from the Empress Eleonora had recently been received. And the young artist, answering her mother's anxious inquiries about a pain, from which she had been suffering, by saying that "the best way not to feel it was not to think of it," bravely set her canvas before her, and bent her mind to the composition of the new picture.

CHAPTER II.

HER DEATH.

ELISABETTA, who had been all her life previously in the enjoyment of sound and even robust health, had been feeling more or less unwell ever since the Lent of that year 1665. She suffered from slight pain in the stomach; and though she could with difficulty be got to speak on the subject, her loss of colour and of flesh showed unmistakeably that she was out of health. She was nevertheless as assiduous as ever at her easel; and in the first days of August was just setting to work on the picture ordered, as has been said, for the Empress Eleonora. On the 12th or 13th of that month, the pain from which she suffered became worse. And as Signor Gallerati, the medical man who attended the family, called that day to see her sister Barbara, who was ill with fever, Elisabetta spoke to him about herself. The learned doctor told her that no medicine could be taken for the present, as the sun was in the sign of the Lion; that her pain was caused by a cold; and that she might take a little syrup of vinegar.

On the 24th she was able to go with her mother to see the fair.

But on the 27th, as she was working in an upper room at her picture, the pain became so violent, that she with difficulty went down stairs to the room where

Barbara was ill in bed, and sitting down on the edge of it, said, "Oh! sister, I have so dreadful a pain in my stomach, that I feel as if I were dying!"

Barbara seeing the sudden changes in her colour, and contortions of her features, feared that she really was about to die; and hurriedly called their mother, who was in the next room. The mother immediately

got her into bed; and a succession of fainting fits, accompanied by profuse cold perspirations followed. A messenger sent in haste to Dr. Gallerati, not finding him at home, brought a Doctor Mattaselani, who was, it appears, one of the leading physicians of the city. This gentleman ordered her purgatives, and ointment for exterior use.

Her mother in the meantime had given her a dose of "Theriaca," that time-honoured Venetian medicine, which was then celebrated all over Europe. It is a very thick oily substance, compounded of some fifty different ingredients, the receipt for which is said, with much probability, to have been brought from the East by the Venetians at a very early period. It was a specific adapted to the then state of medical science, no doubt. But it is a curious fact worth noticing, that this " triaca" as the Lombards call it, is still manufactured at Venice from the old recipe, is still prepared by the principal-perhaps only-manufacturer annually on the same fixed day set apart for generations for this purpose; and quainter still, that on that day the persons employed in the process, dress themselves in fifteenth century costume, and thus accoutred make their fire, bring out their cauldrons, and concoct their medicament on one of the open campi" of Venice, amid a concourse of people assembled to watch

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the annual ceremony. Theriaca now-a-days hardly

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finds its way beyond Venice and the neighbouring parts of Lombardy. But within those limits hardly a peasant's cottage would be found without its bottle of the drug, in which their ancestors placed their faith for so many generations.

The Theriaca, however, as may be supposed, availed nothing to our poor Elisabetta; and the treatment of Dr. Mattaselani as little. The fainting-fits and coldsweats continued the whole night. In the morning of the 28th came Dr. Gallerati, and ordered more purgatives, more ointment, and the application of the diaphragm of a sheep to the stomach! And when no advantage was found to result from this, he gave the patient the celebrated poison antidote "Bezoar,” and the "Olio del Granduca; "-the Grand-duke's oil;an antidote prepared, it should seem, in that Medicean laboratory of poisons in the Uffizi at Florence, which may well be believed to have been more successful in the preparation of them than in its providing antidotes against them.

When the Bezoar and the Grand-duke's oil failed to produce any abatement in the symptoms, the parish priest was sent for! And thus the young artist life, so rich in promise, and in dreams of beauty yet to be embodied, of long years of labour, and praise to be won, was cut short in its spring.

Elisabetta, intent only on her art, and habituated to a wholly objective frame of mind, had made so little account of the symptoms of malady that had manifested themselves during the last four or five months of her life, that her death struck her bereaved family as a wholly sudden and inexplicable calamity. Poison was the first thing that occurred to them. Indeed the idea had already presented itself to the physicians, as

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