even a worse place
{150}--the priest one day urged the husband to come to confession,
thinking that it might lead to more harmony between the married couple.
With which he complied; but when the priest asked him to tell what sins
he had committed, the cavalier answered, "There is no need of it, Padre;
you have heard them all from my wife many a time and oft, and with them a
hundred times as many which I never dreamed of committing--including
those of all Florence."

It was in the first Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which stood on the
site of the present, that San Zenobio in the fourth century had walled
into the high altar an inestimable gift which he had received from the
Pope. This was "the two bodies of the glorious martyrs Abdon and Sennen,
who had been thrown unto wild beasts, which would not touch them,
whereupon they were put to death by swords in the hands of viler human
beasts." I may remark by the way, adds the observant Flaxius, that
relics have of late somewhat lost their value in Florence. I saw not
long ago for sale a very large silver casket, stuffed full of the remains
of the holiest saints, and the certificates of their authenticity, and I
was offered the whole for the value of the silver in the casket--the
relics being generously thrown in! And truly the mass of old bones,
clay, splinters, nails, rags with blood, bits of wood, dried-up eyes, _et
cetera_, was precisely like the Voodoo-box or conjuring bag of an old
darkey in the United States. But then the latter was heathen! "That is
a _very_ different matter."

BIANCONE, THE GIANT STATUE IN THE SIGNORIA

"_Fons Florentinus_.--In foro lympidas aquas fons effundit marmoreis
figuris Neptuni et Faunorum ab Amanate confectis."--_Templum Naturae
Historicum_. HENRICI KORNMANNI, A.D. 1614.

The most striking object in the most remarkable part of Florence is the
colossal marble Neptune in the Fountain of the Signoria, by Ammanati,
dating from 1575. He stands in a kind of car or box, drawn by horses
which Murray declares "are exceedingly spirited." They are indeed more
so than he imagined, for according to popular belief, when the spirit
seizes them and their driver, and the bronze statues round them, they all
go careering off like mad beings over the congenial Arno, and even on to
the Mediterranean! That is to say, that they did so on a time, till they
were all petrified with their driver in the instant when they were
bound