the grudging Pisan! And Madonna
Taddea, a blooming matron, surrounded by her children, laughed with the
tears in her eyes, and told them how one of their number had come near
being born not in a manger like our Lord, but in the open fields.

But a terrible fate hangs over this princely house. Francesco is accused
by the Venetians of violating a treaty, and war is declared against him.
The flower of the Venetian army, led by the bravest of the Venetian
generals, is sent against Padua. There is a long, fierce struggle. In
spite of famine and plague, Francesco holds out to the very last, but
one night the Venetians scale the walls and build their camp-fires on
the Prato. Francesco, with his two sons, Jacopo and Francesco, is loaded
with chains and carried to Venice, and lodged in the dungeons of the
ducal palace. There is the mockery of a trial in one of those great
painted rooms, but there is only one opinion with regard to the sentence
that will be pronounced against them. It is a terrible sight, the
proclamation of that judgment to the prisoners, nearly blind, wan and
half dead in their cells under the canal. When the executioner prepares
to read the fatal document one of them rushes at him and throws his
stool at his head. When the day of execution comes they embrace one
another, and Jacopo writes a letter to his wife, which the tenderness
and sorrow of the chronicler have handed down to us, bidding her pray
for his soul and love their children. Then they are placed upon wooden
chairs in their several dungeons, with their backs toward the door. The
executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the
Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies,
wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in
different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the
old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.

[Illustration: PRATO DELLA VALLE.]

We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades.
Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold
fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries
and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver
hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the
arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms,
stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end
by buying a life of Sant' Antonio f