The Gorgeous Borgia: A Romance

Excerpt from The Gorgeous Borgia: A Romance Yet, even to this cheerless region on this night Of festival, certain revellers found their way. They had drifted along by the side of the Tiber in their genial pilgrimage of pleasure, and now in the moonlight they came, bearing from the river-bank, through the ruined arch into the ill-paved, grass grown space which lay under the brooding shadow of the gaunt wall. In streamed the leaping ood Of laughing men and women, gayly dressed, bright with wine, noisy with clash of cymbals, slap of tambourines, rattle of bells, squeal of pipes, and twang of lutes, and heralded fantastically by the shadows thrown by their torches, that seemed to.