left in the city which was at last
become the vassal of Florence.

Here, truly, the chronicles of Pisa end--in the horrid cruelty, scorn,
and disdain so characteristic of the Florentine. Certainly with the
Medici a more humane government was adopted, so that in 1472 we read of
Lorenzo Magnifico restoring the University to something of its old
splendour, but nothing he could do was able to extinguish the undying
hatred of Pisa for those who had stolen away her liberty. In 1494 that
carnival army of Charles VIII, winding through the valleys and over the
mountains, seemed to offer them a hope of freedom. They welcomed him
with every sort of joy, and hurled the Marzocco and the Gonfalon of
Florence into Arno, all to no purpose. And truly without hope, from 1479
to 1505, they bore heroically three sieges and flung back three
different armies of Florence. Soderini and Macchiavelli urged on the
war. In 1509, Macchiavelli, that mysterious great man, besieged her on
three sides, and at last, forced by hunger and famine, Pisa admitted him
on the 8th June. It was her last fight for liberty. But she had won for
herself the respect of her enemies. A more humane and moderate policy
was adopted in dealing with her. Nevertheless, as in 1406, so now, her
citizens fled away, so that there was scarcely left a Pisan in Pisa for
the victor to rule.

Grand Duke Cosimo seems to have loved her. It was there he founded his
Order of the Knights of St. Stephen to harry the pirates in the
Mediterranean. Still she was a power on the sea, though in the service
of another. And though dead, she yet lived, for she is of those who
cannot die. The ever-glorious name of Galileo Galilei crowns her
immortality. Born within her walls, he taught at her University, and his
first experiments in the knowledge of the law of gravity were made from
her bell-tower, while, as it is said, the great lamp of her Duomo taught
him the secret of the pendulum.

Looking on her to-day, remembering her immortal story, one thinks only
of the beauty that is from of old secure in silence on that meadow among
the daisies just within her walls.

III

It is with a peculiar charm and sweetness that Pisa offers herself to
the stranger, who maybe between two trains has not much time to give
her. And indeed to him she knows she has not much to offer, just a few
things passing strange or beautiful, that are spread out for him as at a
fair, on the grass of a meadow in the dust and