very window of which, and
many a balcony, flaunted gay and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarlet
cloths with rich golden fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous
with varied hues, though the product of antique looms. Each separate
palace had put on a gala dress, and looked festive for the occasion,
whatever sad or guilty secret it might hide within. Every window,
moreover, was alive with the faces of women, rosy girls, and children,
all kindled into brisk and mirthful expression, by the incidents in the
street below. In the balconies that projected along the palace fronts
stood groups of ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering
forth their laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of their
voices, to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.

All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the whole
capacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantastic
variety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through the
midst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward a
never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducal
carriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three golden
lackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by its
single donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and in balconies, in
cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling to and fro afoot,
there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial brotherhood and
sisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise one, too--of being
foolish, all together. The sport of mankind, like its deepest earnest,
is a battle; so these festive people fought one another with an
ammunition of sugar plums and flowers.

Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something that
resembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.
They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some other
worthless kernel, in the midst. Besides the hailstorm of confetti, the
combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it hung
like smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black coat or
priestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently hoary.

At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused much
effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of flowers
was carried on, principally between knights and ladies. Originally, no
doubt, when