their toiling mothers. There was something in their dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori! avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent, and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped them.

Not far from the circus, under a wooden tent, a half score of monsters were whirling round and round in mad rivalry—fishes with enormous mouths and mighty fins, like the terrible "Orco" of Ariosto; wild steeds whose legs blossomed out into acanthus-leaves, like the old grotesques that lurk under the ferns about the basins of the village fountains; great mysterious birds, with big eyes, and golden chains about their necks; beasts with the heads of cats and the bodies of dogs, as monstrous and fantastic a crew, full of high-colored, confused images, as ever rioted in the high-strung brain of some old cinque-cento poet. Each of these terrible monsters had its rider—some little golden-curled child, who clung about the neck of a cat-headed dolphin and shrieked with delight at the danger. Some pale sewing-girl, with a turret of powdered hair above her soft face and her black shawl thrown like a habit around her, sat erect on her white palfrey, and for a moment held herself the equal of the great ladies of other times whose faces looked down upon her from the corridors of the palaces to which she went to carry home her work, and haunted her as she sat alone in her little chamber high up among the red roofs. Some straight-limbed peasant-boy, with a clear-cut face and a red flower in his hat, bestriding the black charger with fiery nostrils, felt his heart swell with noble longing at some dim memory of the glorious deeds of the old warriors of Padua that his grandmother had related to him many a winter's night when the chestnuts were roasting on the hearth and the rain was rustling through the dead vine-stalks. To him every note of the cracked trumpet was full of intoxication: it meant war and love and glory and heroic deeds.

There are brown-faced women in tarnished spangles tumbling on squares of carpet, with their children crouching patiently on the blue handkerchiefs that contain the family wardrobe, waiting for their dinner to be earned. They are assisted by white curly poodles, with pink shaven legs, solemn faces and long ears, which make them look like old Paduan marchesi in powdered wigs. They make the circuit of the carpet on their hind legs, and jump through hoops, and pass the hat among the bystanders, and watch the sleeping babies, and carry the weight of the whole family upon their meditative shoulders.

There are tame magpies that tell the peasant-girls' fortunes by choosing printed slips of paper from a box, and others that predict the winning numbers of next week's lottery. Now and then an old magician passes who has horse-hair curls reaching to his waist, a green shade over his eyes, and carries slung about his neck a board on which sits a drugged cock or a great black cat. He consults his familiar for answers to the questions that are put to him. The peasants form groups about the charlatans and tumblers and ring-throwers, and the sunlight streams over the happy, careless crowd with a blessing. How many of them know that where they stand the early Christians met their death with psalms upon their lips and the palm of martyrdom in their hands?

There was one among those early martyrs, a beautiful young maiden, named Giustina, whose life and death were full of such heroic loveliness that in later times a mighty church was raised in her honor near the spot of the sacrifice. The bones of all her fellow-martyrs were collected and buried in a vault within the edifice. It is a great gray pile, cold and solemn and austere, that rises dark behind the brilliant groups of the fair. On either side of the great staircase crouches a stone monster, some mysterious symbol of the early faith. Tradition gives them the names of the paladins Roland and Oliver. The one clasps the figure of a crusader between its mighty paws—the other, some mystical four-footed creature. They look down upon the merry crowds with solemn unwinking gaze, large-eyed and mysterious. They seem to put the old riddle of the Sphinx to the traveller who pauses by their side to watch the surging waves of human life that beat against the broad stairway of the church. The seal of the centuries is on their broad brows. They have looked down upon battle and tournament, upon success and defeat, upon life and death.

The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic Orlando or Gerusalemme, with undertones of mirth and satire. There the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse, towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when the Prato echoed with the noise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and the terrible Visconti of Milan—all have left the traces of their iron tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes, and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues, and the boys lie on the grass and play at morra or sit for hours with their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups.