heir
obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets
of antiquities; but they were very vivid, for all that.

I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest
myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting
admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian
troops that, 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
gateways 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