of these great
sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having
visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having
been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one
occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's
than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in
the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for
having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are
those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian
waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a
Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has
been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over
the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions
of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual
knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been
there?" asked Heine of Theophile Gautier setting out on a journey
thither.

Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with
a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can
dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the
city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that
flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times
I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had
known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the
swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged
upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather
and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the
ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the
moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters,
but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions
were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies
were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from
museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very
vivid for all that.

I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to
divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay
waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the
Venetian troops that,