rowd with a blessing. How many of them know that
where they stand the early Christians met their death with psalms upon
their lips and the palm of martyrdom in their hands?

There was one among those early martyrs, a beautiful young maiden, named
Giustina, whose life and death were full of such heroic loveliness that
in later times a mighty church was raised in her honor near the spot of
the sacrifice. The bones of all her fellow-martyrs were collected and
buried in a vault within the edifice. It is a great gray pile, cold and
solemn and austere, that rises dark behind the brilliant groups of the
fair. On either side of the great staircase crouches a stone monster,
some mysterious symbol of the early faith. Tradition gives them the
names of the paladins Roland and Oliver. The one clasps the figure of a
crusader between its mighty paws--the other, some mystical four-footed
creature. They look down upon the merry crowds with solemn unwinking
gaze, large-eyed and mysterious. They seem to put the old riddle of the
Sphinx to the traveller who pauses by their side to watch the surging
waves of human life that beat against the broad stairway of the church.
The seal of the centuries is on their broad brows. They have looked down
upon battle and tournament, upon success and defeat, upon life and
death.

The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic
_Orlando_ or _Gerusalemme_, with undertones of mirth and satire. There
the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty
castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of
oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse,
towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after
Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood
and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people
celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous
horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a
sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the
games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been
the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold
it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the
weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their
heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when
the Prato echoed with the n