the horse-fair of Padua, and that
he tried the beast's speed, as these peasants do, by driving him round
and round the statues, raising a cloud of white dust and scattering
crowds of girls and children, who screamed with terror and prayed that
the curse of Sant' Antonio might ever follow him.

Suddenly, a sound as of kettledrums and cymbals and squeaking violins
rose above the neighing and braying of the fair. In front of Santa
Giustina were a circus and a wild-beast show and a crowd of lesser
jugglers and charlatans. Outside the circus-booth, high up on a
platform, stood the clowns in their dingy fleshings and faded scarlet
trunks. They blew furiously on great brass trumpets until their cheeks
were purple and nigh to bursting under all the ghastly chalk. There were
_ballerine_ in draggled pink tarletan petticoats and low white bodices
that made their bony necks and brawny arms still browner by contrast.
They had honest, unpainted faces, and wore their hair screwed up tightly
on the tops of their heads. They bore traces of exposure to wind and
rain. Their eyes had a kind of wistful look, as though they were tired
of all this noise and foolery, and wished themselves back again on the
old olive-farms with their toiling mothers. There was something in their
dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big
drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of
grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in
threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of
sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns
to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori!
avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled
crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent,
and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little
peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped
them.

Not far from the circus, under a wooden tent, a half score of monsters
were whirling round and round in mad rivalry--fishes with enormous
mouths and mighty fins, like the terrible "Orco" of Ariosto; wild steeds
whose legs blossomed out into acanthus-leaves, like the old grotesques
that lurk under the ferns about the basins of the village fountains;
great mysterious birds, with big eyes, and golden chains about their
necks; beasts with the heads of cats and the bodies of dogs,