CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE OWL TOWER "Will you not show me your tower ?" said the sculptor one day to his friend.
"It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks," answered the Count, with a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little symptoms of inward trouble.
"Yes; its exterior is visible far and wide," said Kenyon.

"But such a gray, moss-grown tower as this, however valuable as an object of scenery, will certainly be quite as interesting inside as out.

It cannot be less than six hundred years old; the foundations and lower story are much older than that, I should judge; and traditions probably cling to the walls within quite as plentifully as the gray and yellow lichens cluster on its face without." "No doubt," replied Donatello,--"but I know little of such things, and never could comprehend the interest which some of you Forestieri take in them.

A year or two ago an English signore, with a venerable white beard--they say he was a magician, too--came hither from as far off as Florence, just to see my tower." "Ah, I have seen him at Florence," observed Kenyon.

"He is a necromancer, as you say, and dwells in an old mansion of the Knights Templars, close by the Ponte Vecchio, with a great many ghostly books, pictures, and antiquities, to make the house gloomy, and one bright-eyed little girl, to keep it cheerful!" "I know him only by his white beard," said Donatello; "but he could have told you a great deal about the tower, and the sieges which it has stood, and the prisoners who have been confined in it.