crowd
of people, engaged as buyers or sellers in the petty traffic of a
country fair. Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement,
and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood,
vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps,
yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes
of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware,
old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits,
sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no
object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the
ground. Donkeys, bearing panniers stuffed out with kitchen vegetables,
and requiring an ample roadway, roughly shouldered aside the throng.

Crowded as the square was, a juggler found room to spread out a white
cloth upon the pavement, and cover it with cups, plates, balls, cards,
w the whole material of his magic, in short,--wherewith he proceeded to
work miracles under the noonday sun. An organ grinder at one point, and
a clarion and a flute at another, accomplished what their could towards
filling the wide space with tuneful noise, Their small uproar,
however, was nearly drowned by the multitudinous voices of the people,
bargaining, quarrelling, laughing, and babbling copiously at random;
for the briskness of the mountain atmosphere, or some other cause, made
everybody so loquacious, that more words were wasted in Perugia on this
one market day, than the noisiest piazza of Rome would utter in a month.

Through all this petty tumult, which kept beguiling one's eyes and upper
strata of thought, it was delightful to catch glimpses of the grand
old architecture that stood around the square. The life of the
flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a
fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by
themselves. It might seem irreverent to make the gray cathedral and
the tall, time-worn palaces echo back the exuberant vociferation of the
market; but they did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of
poetic rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic for their
condescension.

On one side, there was an immense edifice devoted to public purposes,
with an antique gallery, and a range of arched and stone-mullioned
windows, running along its front; and by way of entrance it had a
central Gothic arch, elaborately wreathed around with sculptured
semicircles,