saunters by, gazing dreamily up at the graceful galleries. Tired mothers
hasten across the piazza, dragging their tired but happy children after
them. The mothers are red in the face with the heat, their bonnets are
nigh to falling off, and their mighty castles of hair are shaken to
their foundations. The children's hands are filled with dead lilies and
hard cakes, and their faces are aglow with melted sugar and happiness.
They have a weary air, as through surfeit of sweets. They will welcome
the work-day minestra to-night when they reach their homes high up
among the terraces and the chimneys and the clothes-lines. Ah, well!
Sant' Antonio's Day is drawing to a close.

Those children with the lilies in their hands carried me back to the old
religious masque of centuries ago. The chroniclers tell us that every
year, in the month of the Blessed Virgin, a procession formed here on
the piazza in front of the palace composed of all the civil dignitaries,
the priests, the nobles and the different guilds. At their head went two
children beautiful as seraphim, the one dressed in snowy white, with
golden hair falling on his shoulders and a sceptre of white lilies in
his hand--the angel of the Annunciation; the other, clothed in a flowing
blue garment, with long brown hair escaping from under her golden
crown--the Blessed Virgin herself. So they passed on, accompanied by
music and the shouts of the people, through the streets of Padua, that
were hung with crimson arazzi and tapestry from the looms of Flanders
and curtains of cloth of gold. Onward they went to the vineyard outside
the town, in which stands Giotto's chapel. At the gate the procession
paused, and there was a colloquy in rhyme between the Virgin and the
angel, and all the dignitaries listened with profound seriousness, and a
mass was chanted within the chapel, and bombs were exploded, and bells
rung, and there were singing and shouting and feasting throughout Padua.

After all the gaudy brilliancy of the feast-day, after all the hot
unrest of the streets and the stifling atmosphere of the churches, it
was pleasant to stroll toward the gray walls of the town in the late
afternoon. The bells were calling from tower to tower. Along the
grass-grown streets no footfall save our own broke the stillness. Here
and there a goddess or a couple of cherubs bearing an escutcheon smirked
at us from the high garden-walls. Sometimes from within the wrought-iron
gates came the rust