and the gilded chains to
feast his poor little artist-soul upon the frightened young Madonnas and
wide-eyed angels that look out timidly from the arches of the
sepulchres. What grand old phantoms glide on by the side of the laughing
student-lads, and the old market-women in red kerchiefs who tell their
beads in corners, and the young girls who gather the long stalks of
seed-grass from the quadrangle and whisper to them timid questions
concerning their absent lovers!

On the great square in front of the church were booths filled with
bright flowers and early fruit and cheap sweetmeats, at which the
peasants were haggling and chaffering and filling their blue
handkerchiefs. The saints and prophets raised their hands in blessing
from the blossoming spires. Over the way, in the inn of the "Two White
Crosses," the farmers were dining. The laughter floated out through the
open windows, and a man appeared at the door and scattered cherries to
the crowd. By the side of the church was a great sepulchre, horrible
with demon-heads and pictures of the sinners in Purgatory. Above the
heads of the crowd, high on a pedestal, sat a bronze warrior on a fiery
charger. It is old Gattamelata, the _condottiere_ of the Venetian forces
in the long wars with Padua. His body lies within the church, and his
effigy is the work of one Donatello, famous in Tuscan art.

We followed the crowd along the white-walled street to the great
market-square the people call the Prato della Valle. In the middle was a
circular space of meadow, with trees above it, surrounded by a moat,
above which stand life-size statues of warriors and poets and nobles and
philosophers, blackened with the damp and mould of centuries, the folds
of their gowns battered and grass-grown, their noses missing, their eyes
put out by stones in the well-nerved hands of riotous youth, their
swords and sceptres broken short, their pointed beards snapped off into
bluntness. All around the great piazza are arches with _caffes_ and
shops under them. Off at one end rises the massive front of Santa
Giustina.

The broad paved space between the arcades and the moat of the statues
was the scene of a horse-fair. The most miserable animals that the
imagination can conjure up, all the gaunt, ghostly steeds that graze in
the pastures of legend and fable, were gathered there, neighing and
pawing as impatiently as their half-starved spirits would allow. Be sure
Petruchio bought his famous steed at