arch of old days, they would form as diverting a
pair of opposites as any student of humanity could desire for his
entertainment.

I shall begin, with the favor and permission of Heaven, where I think
the business may rightly be said to begin. The time was a May morning,
the morning of May-day, warm and bright with sunlight, one of those
mornings which makes a clod seem like a poet and a poet seem like a god.
The place was the Piazza Santa Felicita, with the Arno flowing pretty
full and freely now between its borders of mud. I can see it all as I
write, as I saw it yesterday, that yesterday so many years ago when
Lappo Lappi was young and Lappentarius never dreamed of.

There is no lovelier day of all the years of days for Florence than
May-day. On that day everybody is or seems to be happy; on that day the
streets of the city are as musical as the courses of the spheres. Youths
and maidens, garlanded and gayly raimented, go about fifing and piping,
and trolling the chosen songs of spring. I think if a stranger should
chance to visit Florence for the first time on a May-day, with the
festival well toward, he might very well think that he had fallen back
by fortunate chance into the youth of the world, when there was nothing
better nor wiser to do than to dance and sing and make merry and make
love. I have heard Messer Brunetto Latini declare, with great eloquence,
that of all the cities man has ever upbuilded with his busy fingers, the
dear city of Cecrops, which Saint Augustine called the dear City of
God--in a word, Athens, was surely the loveliest wherein to live. But
with all respect to Messer Brunetto, I would maintain that no city of
Heathendom or Christendom could be more beautiful than Florence at any
season of the year. What if it be now and then windy; now and then
chilly; now and then dusty? I have talked with a traveller that told me
he had found the winters mighty bitter in Greece. But I think that in
all the history of Florence there never was a May-day like that May-day.
It was gloriously green and gold, gloriously blue and white, gloriously
hot, and yet with a little cool, kissing breeze that made the flaming
hours delectable. And, as I remember so well, I sat on the parapet of
the bridge of the Holy Felicity.

Where the parapet of the embankment joined the beginning of the bridge
of the Santa Felicita there stood, in those days, a large, square,
ornamental fountain. May be it stands there now. I was b