in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the
city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and,
uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it
was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the
heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the
parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is
so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more
now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I
saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great
Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of
their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.

I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring
day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses,
through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom,
and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and
I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I
should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with
the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine
itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great
field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy
loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables,
brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing
fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They
sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze,
and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look
at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of
Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you
like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman
city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and
one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with
the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper
who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red
cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--