

The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an hour.īut the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless, and sagacious.

The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest-ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avator and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood. No pestilence had been ever so fatal, or so hideous. The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. Hear “The Masque of the Red Death” read aloud.
