The skinny hands were clasped upon the breast; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the skull; the skin was brown and sunken; it stretched tightly over the cheek bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp dead eyes were deep in the sockets; the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a weird laugh a full century old! It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can imagine.

Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done laughing at it yet.

At this moment I saw that the old instinct was strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St.Peter's.
They were trying to keep from asking, "Is--is he dead ?" It makes me dizzy, to think of the Vatican--of its wilderness of statues, paintings, and curiosities of every description and every age.

The "old masters" (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there.

I can not write about the Vatican.