iale
where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and
improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience
and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the
rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.

A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA.

I.

We said, during summer days at Venice, when every _campo_ was a
furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arqua." Remembering the
ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not
think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore,
and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So
we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost
lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached
us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out
under a cloudy and windy sky.

We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arqua
upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was
violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua,
and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day
entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following
morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually
began.

The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too
late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic
brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there
was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There
was not yet enough of it to stir the

"Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"

but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not
glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the
ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was
autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the
tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of
its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to
go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch.

The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are
those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the
lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather
silver, and the October sunset loves them. Th