oise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat
about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What
stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the
Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those
gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and
the terrible Visconti of Milan--all have left the traces of their iron
tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes,
and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues,
and the boys lie on the grass and play at _morra_ or sit for hours with
their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant
minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and
the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but
yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it
above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that
haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with
Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon
the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made
its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs
mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind
through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but
by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which
threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent
and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups.

[Illustration: SANTA GIUSTINA.]

Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that
contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such
sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the
Carraras. The old Italian chronicles are written with such sublime and
pathetic simplicity that human life after centuries rises up before us
with all its warm joys and sorrows, delights and agonies. We see him
first, this gallant Francesco, as a youth returning home in triumph from
a victory over the Scaligeri of Verona, welcomed by his old father, the
lord of Padua, there on the Prato, amidst the rejoicings of the people.
Then we see how, when Padua had fallen into the hands of the Visconti,
the old Francesco was kept a prisoner at Monza. His son, Francesco II.,
was also held in bondage by the Milanese, but his proud heart revolted
at