"But a minute after she heard a rattling sound, and looking at the window, there the skull was grinning at her. Again she threw it down, and again it returned, and was with her wherever she went; day after day, waking or sleeping, the skull was always before her eyes.

"At last fear came over her, and then horror, and she said to the old woman, 'Let us go to some place far, far away, and bury the skull. Perhaps it will rest in its grave.' The old woman tried to dissuade her, and they went to a lonely spot at a great distance, and there they dug long and deep.

"Dug till a great hole was made, and the lady standing on the edge dropped the skull into it. Then the hole spread into a great pit, flame rose from it--the edge crumbled away--the guilty woman fell into the fire, and the earth closed over it all, and there was no trace left of her.

"The skull returned to the castle and to its room ; people say it is there to this day. The old woman returned too, and being the last remote relation, entered into possession of the property."

There is perhaps not one well-educated person in society in England who has not had the opportunity to remark how very much any old family can succeed in being notorious if it can only once make it known that it has an hereditary secret. Novels will be written on it, every member of it will be pointed out everywhere, and people who do not know the name of a sovereign in Europe can tell you all about it and them. And the number is not small of those who consider themselves immensely greater because they have in some way mastered something which they are expected to keep concealed. I could almost believe that this " 'orrible tale" was composed as a satire on family secrets. But I believe that she who told it firmly believed it. Credo quia absurdum would not be well understood among humble folk in Italy.

"To this I may add," writes Flaxius, "that there is an English legend of a certain skull which always returned to a certain window in a tower. Apropos of which there is a poem called The Student and the Head in ' Hans Breitmann in Germany' (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), prefaced by a remark to the effect that the subject is so extensive as to deserve a book--instancing the head of the physician Douban in the 'Arabian Nights,' with that of Orpheus, which spoke to Cyrus, and that of the priest of Jupiter, and another described by Trallianus, and the marvellously preserved head of a saint in Olaf Tryggvason's Saga, and the Witch's Head of Rider Haggard, with many more, not to speak of the talking Teraphim heads, and Friar Bacon's bust. With which a thoroughly exhaustive list should include the caput mortuum of the alchemists