Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a face of horror.

"I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful death!" "Nay; if it be a great height," said Kenyon, "a man would leave his life in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom." "That is not the way with this kind of death!" exclaimed Donatello, in a low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion as he proceeded.

"Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air! No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and dream of it no more!" "How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!" said the sculptor, aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count's words, and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look.

"Nay, if the height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all unguarded hours.

You are not safe in your chamber.