hang the
escutcheons of the more famous of the students of past centuries, gray
with age and mould and cobweb. What colossal figures stalk about the
quadrangle and along the overhanging galleries! The mightiest minds of
Europe are among them. Every footfall makes an echo across the
centuries. Yet of all the old shadows, the one that has the greatest
charm for me is that of the gray-haired serving-man who steals along the
gallery with the bundle under his arm. Do you say it is only the
sunlight lying athwart the arches? I tell you it is Portia's faithful
servant, and he has been to the university to seek Doctor Balthazar, her
cousin, and has obtained from him a lawyer's cap and gown, and he is
hastening home to Belmont, that his mistress may don them and reach
Venice in time to save Antonio from the Jew's hands.

Sedate groups of students were seated on the terrace of the _caffe_
opposite sipping beer in gentlemanly Italian fashion. Here and there
some honest burgher family, out for a holiday, was cooling itself with
pink ices after the pilgrimage to the shrine. The female members were
clothed with garments of such exaggerated form and color that one sees
at once why Petruchio, in spite of his madness, had wit enough left to
send to Venice for the wedding-clothes, and why Katharine, after the
atrocious fashions of Padua, was disposed to be content with anything
the Veronese tailor chose to offer her.

We sauntered on to where the afternoon sun flashed red against the great
arched windows of the Palace of Reason. It is a mighty stone edifice,
with a curved glass roof over the great justice-hall, which was the
pride of mediaeval Padua. Under the pointed arches of the wide galleries
outside are gathered gray old milestones and funeral tablets and antique
busts that carry the stranger back to the days of Latin legend, when old
Antenor came up from the south and founded the city.

On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the
market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and
folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable
feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping
it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the
echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of
a weary fruit-seller. In the little _caffe_ under the arcades the idlers
seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student