tall mountains on either hand still fall athwart the roads, and cool morning air breathes up from the rushing Serchio.

The Serchio—a noble river, yet willful as a mountain-torrent—flows round the embattled walls of Lucca, and falls into the Mediterranean below Pisa. It is calm now, on this day of the great festival, sweeping serenely by rocky capes, and rounding into fragrant bays, where overarching boughs droop and feather. But there is a sullen look about its current, that tells how wicked it can be, this Serchio, lashed into madness by winter storms, and the overflowing of the water-gates above, among the high Apennines—at the Abbetone at San Marcello, or at windy, ice-bound Pracchia.

How fair are thy banks, O mountain-bordered Serchio! How verdant with near wood and neighboring forest! How gay with cottage groups—open-galleried and garlanded with bunches of golden maize and vine-branches—all laughing in the sun! The wine-shops, too, along the road, how tempting, with snowy table-cloths spread upon dressers under shady arbors of lemon—trees; pleasant odors from the fry cooking in the stove, mixing with the perfume of the waxy flowers! Dear to the nostrils of the passers-by are these odors. They snuff them up—onions, fat, and macaroni, with delight. They can scarcely resist stopping once for all here, instead of waiting for their journey's end to eat at Lucca.

But the butterflies—and they are many—are wiser in their generation. The butterflies have a festival of their own to-day. They do not wait for any city. They are fixed to no spot. They can hold their festival anywhere under the blue sky, in the broad sunshine.

See how they dance among the flowers! Be it spikes of wild-lavender, or yellow down within the Canterbury bell, or horn of purple cyclamens, or calyx of snowy myrtle, the soft bosom of tall lilies or glowing petals of red cloves—nothing comes amiss to the butterflies. They are citizens of the world, and can feast wherever fancy leads them.

Meanwhile, on comes the crowd, nearer and nearer to the city of their pilgrimage, laughing, singing, talking, smoking. Your Italian peasant must sleep or smoke, excepting when he plays at morra (one, two, three, and away!). Then he puts his pipe into his pocket. The women are conversing in deep voices, in the patois of the various villages. The men, more silent, search out who is fairest—to lead her on the way, to kneel beside her at the shrine, and, most prized of all, to conduct her home. Each village has its belle, each belle her circle of admirers. Belles and beaux all have their own particular plan of diversion for the day. For is it not a great day? And is it not stipulated in many of the marriage contracts among the mountain tribes that the husband must, under a money penalty, conduct his wife to the festival of the Holy Countenance once at least in four years? The programme is this: First, they enter the cathedral, kneel at the glistening shrine of the black crucifix, kiss its golden slipper, and hear mass. Then they will grasp such goods as the gods provide them, in street, café, eating-house, or day theatre; make purchases in the shops and booths, and stroll upon the ramparts. Later, when the sun sinks westward over the mountains, and the deep canopy of twilight falls, they will return by the way that they have come, until the coming year.

* * * * *

Within the city, from before daybreak, church-bells—and Lucca abounds in belfries fretted tier upon tier, with galleries of delicate marble colonnettes, all ablaze in the sunshine—have pealed out merrily.

Every church-door, draped with gold tissue and silken stuffs, more or less splendid, is thrown wide open. Every shop is closed, save cafés, hotels, and tobacco-shops (where, by command of the King of New Italy, infamous cigars are sold). Eating-tables are spread at the corners of the streets and under the trees in the piazza, benches are ranged everywhere where benches can stand. The streets are filling every moment as fresh multitudes press through the city gates—those grand old gates, where the marble lions of Lucca keep guard, looking toward the mountains.

For a carriage to pass anywhere in the streets would be impossible, so tightly are flapping Leghorn hats, and veils, snowy handkerchiefs, and red caps and brigand hats, packed together. Bells ring, and there are waftings of military music borne through the air. Trumpet-calls at the different barracks answer to each other. Cannons are fired. Each man, woman, and child shouts, screams, and laughs. All down the dark, cavernous streets, in the great piazza, at the sindaco's, at college, at club, public offices, and hotels, at the grand old palaces, untouched since the middle ages—the glory of the city—at every house, great and small—flutter gaudy draperies; crimson, amber, violet, and gold, according to purse and condition, either of richest brocade, or of Eastern stuffs wrought in gold and needle-work, or—the family carpet or bed-furniture hung out for show. Banners wave from every house-top and tower, the Italian tricolor and the Savoy cross, white, on a red ground; flowers and garlands are wreathed on the fronts of the stern old walls. If peasants, and shopkeepers, and monks, priests, beggars, and hoi polloi generally, possess the pavement, overhead every balcony, gallery, terrace, and casement, is filled with company, representatives of the historic families of Lucca, the Manfredi, Possenti, Navascoes, Bernardini, dal Portico, Bocella, Manzi, da Gia, Orsetti, Ruspoli—feudal names dear to native ears. The noble marquis, or his excellency the count, lord of broad acres on the plains, or principalities in the mountains, or of hoarded wealth at the National Bank—is he not Lucchese also to the backbone? And does he not delight in the festival as keenly as that half-naked beggar, who rattles his box for alms, with a broad grin on his dirty face?

Resplendent are the ladies in the balconies, dressed in their best—like bands of fluttering ribbon stretched across the sombre-fronted palaces; aristocratic daughters, and dainty consorts. They are not chary of their charms. They laugh, fan themselves, lean over sculptured balustrades, and eye the crowded streets, talking with lip and fan, eye and gesture.

In the long, narrow street of San Simone, behind the cathedral of San Martino, stand the two Guinigi Palaces. They are face to face. One is ditto of the other. Each is in the florid style of Venetian-Gothic, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. Both were built by Paolo Guinigi, head of the illustrious house of that name, for forty years general and tyrant of the Republic of Lucca. Both palaces bear his arms, graven on marble tablets beside the entrance. Both are of brick, now dulled and mellowed into a reddish white. Both have walls of enormous thickness. The windows of the upper stories—quadruple casements divided, Venetian-like, by twisted pillarettes richly carved—are faced and mullioned with marble.

The lower windows (mere square apertures) are barred with iron. The arched portals opening to the streets are low, dark, and narrow. The inner courts gloomy, damp, and prison-like. Brass ornaments, sockets, rings, and torch-holders of iron, sculptured emblems, crests, and cognizances in colored marble, are let into the outer walls. In all else, ornamentation is made subservient to defense. These are city fortresses rather than ancestral palaces. They were constructed to resist either attack or siege.

Rising out of the overhanging roof (supported on wooden rafters) of the largest and most stately of the two palaces, where twenty-three groups of clustered casements, linked by slender pillars, extend in a line along a single story—rises a mediaeval tower of defense of many stories. Each story is