tonne paper of blue
and brown, a carpetless floor, a table, and some common, straw chairs
placed against the wall. From the anteroom two doors led into two
bedrooms, one on either side. Another door, opposite the entrance,
opened into the sitting-room.

All the windows this way faced toward the garden, the wall of which
ran parallel to the palace and to the street. The marchesa's room
had flaunting green walls with a red border; the ceiling was gaudily
painted with angels, flowers, and festoons. Some colored prints hung
on the walls--a portrait of the Empress Eugenie on horseback, in a
Spanish dress, and four glaring views of Vesuvius in full eruption. A
divan, covered with well-worn chintz, ran round two sides of the
room. Between the ranges of the graceful casements stood a marble
console-table, with a mirror in a black frame. An open card-table
was placed near the marchesa. On the table there was a pack of not
over-clean cards, some markers, and a pair of candles (the candles
still unlighted, for the days are long, and it is only six o'clock).
There was not a single ornament in the whole room, nor any object
whatever on which the eye could rest with pleasure. White-cotton
curtains concealed the delicate tracery and the interlacing columns of
the Venetian windows. Beneath lay the Moorish garden, entered from
the street by an arched gate-way, over which long trails of ivy hung.
Beautiful in itself, the Moorish garden was an incongruous appendage
to a Gothic palace. One of the Guinigi, commanding for the Emperor
Charles V. in Spain, saw Granada and the Alhambra. On his return to
Lucca, he built this architectural plaisance on a bare plot of ground,
used for jousts and tilting. That is its history. There it has been
since. It is small--a city garden--belted inside by a pointed arcade
of black-and-white marble.

In the centre is a fountain. The glistening waters shoot upward
refreshingly in the warm evening air, to fall back on the heads of
four marble lions, supporting a marble basin. Fine white gravel covers
the ground, broken by statues and vases, and tufts of flowering shrubs
growing luxuriantly under the shelter of the arcade--many-colored
altheas, flaming pomegranates, graceful pepper-trees with bright,
beady seeds, and magnolias, as stalwart as oaks, hanging over the
fountain.

The strong perfume of the magnolia-blossoms, still white upon
the boughs, is wafted upward to the open window of the marchesa's
sittin