iny of accepting,
as many nobles did, the indemnity of a franc a day, due to every
impoverished patrician under the stipulations of the cession to Austria.

At the beginning of winter, this young gentleman was still lingering in
a country house situated at the base of the Tyrolese Alps, and purchased
in the previous spring by the Duchess Cataneo. The house, erected by
Palladio for the Piepolo family, is a square building of the finest
style of architecture. There is a stately staircase with a marble
portico on each side; the vestibules are crowded with frescoes, and
made light by sky-blue ceilings across which graceful figures float
amid ornament rich in design, but so well proportioned that the building
carries it, as a woman carries her head-dress, with an ease that
charms the eye; in short, the grace and dignity that characterize
the _Procuratie_ in the piazetta at Venice. Stone walls, admirably
decorated, keep the rooms at a pleasantly cool temperature. Verandas
outside, painted in fresco, screen off the glare. The flooring
throughout is the old Venetian inlay of marbles, cut into unfading
flowers.

The furniture, like that of all Italian palaces, was rich with handsome
silks, judiciously employed, and valuable pictures favorably hung; some
by the Genoese priest, known as _il Capucino_, several by Leonardo da
Vinci, Carlo Dolci, Tintoretto, and Titian.

The shelving gardens were full of the marvels where money has been
turned into rocky grottoes and patterns of shells,--the very madness
of craftsmanship,--terraces laid out by the fairies, arbors of sterner
aspect, where the cypress on its tall trunk, the triangular pines, and
the melancholy olive mingled pleasingly with orange trees, bays, and
myrtles, and clear pools in which blue or russet fishes swam. Whatever
may be said in favor of the natural or English garden, these trees,
pruned into parasols, and yews fantastically clipped; this luxury of art
so skilfully combined with that of nature in Court dress; those cascades
over marble steps where the water spreads so shyly, a filmy scarf swept
aside by the wind and immediately renewed; those bronzed metal figures
speechlessly inhabiting the silent grove; that lordly palace, an object
in the landscape from every side, raising its light outline at the
foot of the Alps,--all the living thoughts which animate the stone,
the bronze, and the trees, or express themselves in garden plots,--this
lavish prodigality was in