lamps out, and the priest would gladly launch a malediction at his head,
but that he knows his man, for Petruchio's pranks with the clergy are
the talk of all Padua.

He is the delight of the university lads, this mad fellow from Verona.
See how they crowd about him as he stalks down the nave, and crave a
look or a salute from their bully hero! They lay bets in lecture-hours
as to whether he will succeed in taming that young shrew, Baptista's
daughter.

Be sure the Moorish prince and he of Arragon stopped with their trains
to ask the saint's protection when they went to woo fair Portia. And the
lady herself, after that good deed done in Venice, when she went praying
about at holy crosses, craved the saint's blessing on her lord,
Bassanio. He too, I wager, meditated here on his lady and his friend.
They crowd, a shadowy multitude, about the gleaming sepulchre under the
crimson glow of the silver lamps.

We wandered on, past the carved chapel-gates, the wrought bronze lamps,
the incense-clouds and the silver-white lilies, out into the tomb-filled
cloisters. There they lie, cheek by jowl--old professors from the
university in cap and gown, high up under the arches; old warriors in
armor, with their griffins and lions at their feet, and slaves bearing
scrolls with their names and exploits registered thereon. Old
councillors and syndics in robe and ruff, noble women in veil and coif,
lie side by side with some brave young heart that shed its life's blood
for united Italy.

[Illustration: PADUAN CAFFE.]

Old dragons and monsters and wide-mouthed cherubim leer down from the
gray sepulchres. From under the pointed arches, blossoming with
palm-leaves and sweet stone child-faces, young painted angels,
soft-eyed, long-haired, in pink and blue robes, smile down from the gold
background, with emblems of resurrection in their hands, like flowers
springing from the dust beneath. Here and there, high up under the
cornice of some old Gothic tomb, is a round-eyed frescoed Madonna
watching the slumbers of an old knight whose bed-curtain is upheld by
long-armed saints. Pompous and grim and fantastic and sullen by turns,
these tombs would make the heart of the stranger ache with their
mockery, but that the living sunlight streams athwart the hard stone
faces and the monster heads, and in the quadrangle of the cloister the
lilies are standing like white-robed heavenly hosts, and a well upheld
by angels rises up from the rank meadow-s