CHAPTER VI.

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

SEPTEMBER, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B.

LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at

Washington.

AMONG THE KABYLES.

TWO PAPERS.--I.

[Illustration: MOSQUE AND DWELLING OF MARABOUTS, KOUKOU.]

Remains of old nationalities are scattered in odd corners all over the

earth. Every land, almost, possesses a relic of the kind markedly

different from the specimens preserved elsewhere, and peculiar enough to

give color to the old theory of its having sprung from the soil. These

torn and battered shreds of humanity are usually found lodged among the

rocks, the blast of foreign invasion having driven them thither from the

plains. The mountains not only give them shelter, but seem to reinfuse

new vigor, and thus in many cases enable them to exert more or less of a

reflex influence on their conquerors. This influence varies with the

character of the country and of the respective races. The invaders, if

actuated by civilizing impulses and not mere military ambition, will

make themselves useful and necessary to the natives, develop what

capacity they have, and absorb them politically. In the opposite case

fusion is not effected, and a degree of antagonism is maintained which

breaks out on occasion into actual hostilities. Between these two

extreme cases we may trace an infinity of examples, modified by endless

combinations of circumstances and conditions.

In Great Britain we see the Gael whirled up by successive gusts from

Italy, the Elbe and Normandy into the clefts of the Welsh and Scottish

mountains. France has driven her aborigines into the peninsula of

Brittany and the gorges of the Eastern Pyrenees. The Finns find refuge

among the frozen swamps north-east of St. Petersburg. The ethnic museum

of mountainous Spain is more rich and varied than that of her Northern

neighbors, and Italy has remnants dating back into the night of historic

time in Sardinia and the Abruzzi. Japan, ancient as she is, has her

Ainos of unrecorded antiquity, and the ranges of Central India are

haunted by races still more primitive and unprepossessing in manners and

physiognomy. Over the plains of both continents so many successive waves

of population have swept that no race can claim more than a comparative

antiquity. The traceable pedigree of any given community becomes very

short indeed, and the inquirer contents himself with conceding that the

Thibetan sept which arrogates descent from Alexander's Greeks may do so

with truth--say as much truth as there was in the descent of certain

straw-colored Creeks and Choctaws from the followers of De Soto.

Unlike the Thibetans, the Kabyles repudiate classic origin. They are the

only people who have made "barbarian" a title of honor, and call

themselves Berbers, the modern name having been given them by the

Arabs. The dwellers on the Danube, the Seine and the Thames, who once

shared with them the designation of "barbarian," were quick to shake it

off. European Barbary exists no longer. Its modern inhabitants amuse

themselves with exploring the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and

in ascertaining whether their whilom fellow-provincials of that coast

are still determined to be barbarous in fact as in name. The Germans

took their turn at an attempt of this character in the days of Genseric,

the Vandal name and nation having wound up its career in Africa, sinking

into the sands of that inhospitable continent irrecoverably, unless we

accept the Kabyles as the representatives of their blood. Forty years

ago another Northern race entered upon the task, the misrule of the Arab

and the Turk having apparently prepared the way for a new invasion. The

French pined for an opportunity of testing once more their genius for

colonization, and they selected this time, in place of a wild tract in

America or Oceanica, a region opposite their own shores cultivated and

densely peopled when Gaul was savage, and still occupied by inhabitants

as proud and turbulent as those who proposed to reclaim and reconstruct

them. Kabylia proper is a part of the Algerine territory but a few hours

distant from the walls of Algiers, of the size of an average French

department, and having a population of one hundred and seventy-five to

the square mile--a ratio identical with that of France. But the new

province, like its new mother--or step-mother--country, had also its

outliers of territory and people. The Kabyles overflow east, west and

south. They nearly equal the Arabs of Algeria in numbers, the Mountain

Kabyles being estimated at five hundred and eighty thousand, and those

of the plain at three hundred and seventy-nine thousand, while the Arabs

count in all one million three hundred and eighty-five thousand. These

figures measure the extent to which the Oriental immigration has

supplanted the natives of Romano-Gothic Numidian origin. Its effect in

other respects has hardly been in a like proportion. It has imposed the

Mohammedan religion in a modified form, strangely mixed with relics of

older superstitions. In language it has wrought much less of a change,

though more than can be traced to either the Vandals or the Romans. In

physique and manners the difference between Arab and Kabyle remains

sharply drawn. The Arabs are gaunt and indolent dwellers in tents, as

they were in the days of Job, the spear their only implement; while the

Kabyles herd in towns, weave, forge and plough. Red beards, light eyes,

broad and round skulls and massive features are not unfrequent among the

Kabyle men, and in many of the villages the children are all blondes, as

are to a less degree the women.

[Illustration: OIL-WORKS.]

In nothing, perhaps, is the line more strongly drawn between the two

races than in the treatment of their females. The Asiatic seclusion of

women is unknown among the Kabyles. There are no harems and no veils.

If, in return, the Kabyle women are subjected to more of such unfeminine

employments as harvesting and turning the wheels of olive-mills, that

does not lessen the assimilation to Western usage, but rather increases

the resemblance between the life of the fair Africans and that of their

sisters among the peasantry of Europe. Carrying water, so characteristic

a female office in the East, as the artists are constantly reminding us,

is none the less so among the Kabyles. But it becomes a more serious

matter when the wells or streams are three or four hundred feet lower

than the site of the dwelling to be supplied. In such cases donkeys come

to the aid of their mistresses, at some sacrifice of the picturesque,

but with great advantage to comfort.

A water-supply thus obtained must be, it is obvious, inadequate to the

demands of scrupulous cleanliness. Accordingly, the desert wanderer has

the advantage in this respect of the Kabyles, crowded into a village

perched on the summit of a rock and traversed only by pathways cut, as

it were, through solid blocks of houses. These abodes are of but one

story, and generally of one room. Bipeds and quadrupeds live together,

eating and sleeping on the same earthen floor. There are no chimneys and

no windows. Cutaneous and ophthalmic affections are of course common,

and typhus fever now and then redresses the balance in Malthusian

fashion by reducing the crowd. Death is the great sanitary regulator or

superintendent of hygiene. His functions in this regard are but

slightly, if at all, interfered with by the authorities of the village.

The head of the municipality is an officer called an _amin_: we might

style him the mayor. He is chosen by popular suffrage from each of the

family or patriarchal groups or clans composing the community in turn.

He is guided in his administration by a code of written laws bearing the

name of _khanoun_ or canon, established from time immemorial. He is

checked also by a city council chosen from among the notables, and is

required to consult it before taking any executive or judicial step. The

secretary of the council, elected by it, bears the title of _chodja_. He

is generally an old codger, for the double reason that clerks usually do

grow old in harness, and that writing is not a universal accomplishment

among the Kabyles and competition for the office is not great. He keeps

the journal of the municipality, and conducts all its correspondence

with other towns and with the French authorities. He enjoys a salary,

paid in kind with figs, olives, etc. In this pleasant feature of his

post he seems to be distinguished from his associate functionaries. We

do not find that they receive any pay, unless in the indirect shape of

bribes and perquisites--a mode of compensation as well understood in the

East as in the West.

Moslem influence shows itself in the close association of Church and

State. The mosque of each town has its treasury, fed by the fines

imposed on transgressors by the municipal council and by dues from the

registration of marriages, births and deaths. The sacred building itself

serves another purpose still more alien to its religious character. The

hustings, even among this simple and primitive people, are not scenes of

unbroken tranquillity. There are always two parties in the village, as

with us; but, as fortunately is not the in the United States, these

parties have casehardened into hereditary factions, always ready to air

their ancestral feuds at the polls. Bullets come to the aid of ballots.

To use the local expression, "The speaking is done with powder." The

rude fire-lock of the country, with its absurdly long barrel and

wheel-lock, answers well enough at short range, and proves highly

influential in bringing about a speedy decision without the assistance

of returning boards and electoral commissions. The villages have rarely

more than two or three thousand souls, and cover but a few acres. The

dispute cannot last long, and contested elections are soon settled. The

mosque is one story higher than the other buildings, having a second

floor. It is also on more elevated ground. These attractions cause the

sanctuary to fill up rapidly in time of trouble. The faithful who get

first to church have a marked advantage over their fellow-parishioners.

[Illustration: A KABYLE WAKE.]

The administration of the tribe comes directly under French control. It

is committed to a chief who is not allowed to interfere with the local

affairs of the villages composing the tribe. But pressure in the

direction of centralization is gradually being employed by the French,

in accordance with the political notions and genius of that nation. It

needs, however, to be used with extreme caution, as warning catastrophes

still occur to prove. The solemn engagement made when the Kabyles

capitulated in 1857, to rigidly respect their public customs and their

communal elections, will enforce itself upon the more or less sincere

attention of the invaders as long as they possess the country. The

stormy clanhood that insists on the luxury of at least an annual fight

among neighbors is often the last hold of national independence.

[Illustration: THE POLLS: MODEL VOTERS.]

France is not the first suzerain who has found it hard to rule, and

indispensable to sedulously humor, these restless indigenes. They were

quite as troublesome to the Turks. The dey of Algiers was but a nominal

branch of the home house at Constantinople. Thanks to his Kabyle

constituents, he did business pretty much on his own account and in his

own way. Could the sultan have been held responsible for the piracies of

his nominal vassal, they would have been put an end to a century sooner.

He could not control the dey because the dey could not control the

Kabyles. At the village of Tiza-Terga is shown--or was a year or two

ago--a curious field-piece of hexagonal form abandoned by the Turks in

the seventeenth century after an unsuccessful attack on the Kabyle

stronghold of Koukou. When the dey yielded to the French he conveyed

what he was unable to deliver, and the conquest of the country has been

going on ever since. This process of subjugation is anything but

steady. The years of tranquillity outnumber those of disturbance, and

that disproportion, already very great, may be said to be increasing. In

the long intervals of peace everything goes on smoothly. The natives

busy themselves in their fields and their simple workshops, content with

the occasional effervescence of a town-quarrel. The exports of the

province mount up rapidly. France felicitates herself on the brilliant

success of her experiment, sends over small groups of immigrants and

occupies herself with projects of vast prospective value. Paper railways

permeate the gorges of the Djurjura Mountains, and paper canals lead the

waters of the Mediterranean into the desert basin beyond. She repairs

some of the Roman aqueducts, builds wooden bridges, keeps at bay the

purely predatory tribes of the interior, and protects industry as

certainly it never was protected under the Turks. She manifests a

sincere wish to make the tri-color a blessing to Africa, and with time

and no disaster at home bids fair to succeed.

[Illustration: KABYLE ARMORERS AT WORK.]

Were she to be driven out to-day, the traces of her beneficent sway

would be more marked than those left by her predecessors, or by _their_

predecessors the Vandals. They could not possibly be less so. The

mission of both these was fruitful chiefly of disorder and devastation.

Compared with them, the natives whom they ruled against incessant

protest were the representatives of civilization. The Arabs built a few

forts on the beach to shelter piracy. What the Vandals left were burnt

and overthrown walls, the memory of some religious riots, and a small

library of pious polemics. Between them, they held the country for

fifteen centuries: the Romans had it for four. All the moles and

artificial forts, numerous and often massive; all the aqueducts, some of

them spanning ravines three hundred feet deep, and others stretching for

many leagues; all the cities, tombs and temples, of which the remains

are scattered from the sea to the peaks,--everything, in fact, which

shows that this was once a domain of art and intellect and culture, is

Roman. Roman sepulchres look down upon the central French cantonment;

Roman coins and gems are thrown out by the zouave, who works with the

pick in one hand and the rifle in the other; and the squared stones and

round columns of Roman temples are built into the huts of the people and

the forts of their present rulers.

This superiority of the ancient methods of colonization, as attested by

results, cannot be explained by any advantage in the arts of war

comparable to that now enjoyed by the invading nation. Gunpowder did not

exist to cast the balance. The success attained must be ascribed to a

deeper knowledge of the arts of peace, and especially those of

government. Surely the nineteenth century ought to be able to discover

the secret.

Their suspicions once allayed, and apprehensions of purposes of mere

military encroachment and new oppression removed, the Kabyles are very

ready to forward the construction of works of public utility, and

respond with alacrity to calls for labor. The mountain-streams, nearly

dry for great part of the year, are at times swelled by destructive

floods which carry down great boulders and trunks of trees. For want of

bridges, access to the open-air markets which are held at places and

periods fixed by long usage is thus liable to be prevented.

One of the most largely attended of these markets is held on the right

bank of the small river Djemaa at a point about midway between Fort

National on the north and the summit of the Djurjura on the south, three

or four leagues from either. The crowd of buyers and sellers, most of

them belonging to both classes, reaches as many as four thousand. The

freshets of the Djemaa becoming yearly more of an impediment to travel,

the tribe of the Beni-Menguellet, upon whose territory the fair is held,

became fearful of the loss of its commercial advantages, which were

largely dependent on the visits of the tribes on the left bank. They

consequently proposed the building of a bridge, and offered to furnish

men and materials to be used under French direction. A section of

sappers commanded by a lieutenant soon finished the work with the aid

promised. The Kabyles showed great skill in the handling of their rude

tools. With their small axes they felled large trees so rapidly as to

astonish the French. The felling, however, was a minor part of the task.

The heavy beams had to be carried from the bottom of the steep ravine up

goat-paths to the level of the bridge. This was done in the old

Egyptian way, by sheer multiplication of hands, with no aid from the

mechanical forces. A number of men took hold of each beam and of

hand-spikes passed under it where the track was wide enough, and others

drew by ropes. The slow and solemn procession, enlivening its way with

equally solemn chants in the deepest of gutturals, climbed the precipice

on the slow but sure principle. The bridge was a success, the threatened

diversion of trade escaped, and Beni-Menguellet stock stood at a higher

quotation than ever. A squad of sappers, not a mouthful in a military

sense for the hundreds of Kabyles they supervised, had done more to win

the loyalty of the natives than a brigade of _beaux sabreurs_ or

cave-smokers could have accomplished. The hammer rather than the musket

is the weapon of subjugation.

[Illustration: FORT NATIONAL.]

[Illustration: ROMAN TOMB, NEAR FORT NATIONAL.]

At these markets Kabylia sits to the foreigner for her picture. How she

lives, what she produces and what she wants is plainly and picturesquely

stated. The inevitable Jew, in beard and gaberdine, brings from the city

his pack of trinkets and gay stuff, with bales of heavier tissues for

the excessively simple work-day robes of the Kabyle. The rich plain of

Oued Sahel sends its wheat and barley to exchange for the products of

the hill-loving olive-orchard and fig-plantation. The Beni-Janni, chiefs

of the metal-workers, sit surrounded by enticing rows of swords,

daggers, guns, armlets, leglets, silver and copper-gilt head-dresses and

brooches. Vases in clay, ornamental and plain in every gradation, are

the specialty of the Beni-Aissi. The Beni-bou-Yousef are the weavers,

famous for many-colored haiks and burnouses, leaving to the Beni-Abbes a

repute for similar garments of a particular striped fabric. Horses of

the Barb type, small but elegant in figure, come from all quarters; but

mules, which are offered in considerable number, are something of a

monopoly with the Beni-Ouassif, the Kentuckians of Kabylia. Women,

indifferent as to tribe, and indifferent also, it is sad to state, in

appearance, being mostly over age, spread stores of butter, honey, eggs,

fruit, lean poultry and herbs. The young ladies, there as in other parts

of the world, come not to sell, but to shop. Things of Paris are not

wanting to encourage this propensity, which grows by what it feeds on,

and promotes the civilization of the country by the creation of

artificial wants.

[Illustration: AN IMPROVISED GOBLET.]

Brushing through dewy thickets of lentisk and rose-bay, or drawn sharp

against the vivid African sky on the summit of a bare spur, groups of

mountaineers with their wares and their flocks wend their way at dawn to

the market. It has the air of a unanimous turn-out of the family, all

who can walk or be carried, with dogs, goats, sheep, asses and cattle,

yielding to the common attraction. The Kabyles, unlike the Arabs, do not

smoke, making up for that privation by a much greater consumption of

meat. The marketers of the Beni-Menguellet will swallow for breakfast

and dinner two score oxen and twice as many sheep and goats. The

butchering is done on the spot, or rather hard by, usually by negroes

who make it their profession, and journey from fair to fair with the

outfit of knives and steel and a reed flute to beguile the way with

genuine African melodies. The Kabyles have no higher use for the negro,

the post of seraglio-guard assigned him among wealthier and more

orthodox Moslems being a sinecure with them.

When we remember that these large commercial reunions are held as often

as each week, we are prepared to recognize a degree of movement and

energy sufficient of itself to separate sharply the Kabyles from their

Asiatic coreligionists. Repose is not their chief luxury. The charms of

_kief_ are less irresistible than to the Arab or the Turk. The mere

labor, indeed, of reaching their rock-built homes exacts considerable

bodily exertion. Compared with a daily climb of some hundreds of feet

when the ploughman homeward takes his weary way, the toil of the

harvest-field below looks like recreation. A life which keeps the blood

circulating so rapidly cannot fail to develop a hardy race full of the

pride born of conscious strength, and not disposed to yield readily to

lords who exhaust their physical powers in scaling their eyries. Long

training has given the natives something of the agility of the monkeys

with which they share the crags. Kabyle sharpshooters obstructed the

completion of French hill-forts by ascending the parapet at night and

waking the garrison and the workmen with a storm of balls. The pursuit

of them, when driven back, was unavailing. The soldiers, encumbered with

clothing and accoutrements and shod with stiff leather, could hold no

headway with the Kabyle clad only in a tunic and grasping the cliffs

with four hands like the monkeys. Finally, dogs were imported, regularly

brigaded and regularly credited at the commissariat. Dogs are keen

distinguishers of persons and acute ethnologists. These traits, however,

were possessed alike by the African curs, which outnumbered the

quadruped Gauls and fully sympathized with the prejudices of their dusky

proprietors. This difficulty was fatal to the canine crusade. The

infidel dogs were too many for the Christians, and were soon able to

redevote themselves to older enemies, the jackals and hyaenas.

A preference for peaceful industry may be said to have always prevailed

among the Kabyles when left to themselves. The chronic passion for

fighting was rather localized: particular villages were affected by it.

That of Taka, for instance, commandingly posted on a height thirty-five

hundred feet above the level of the sea, has always been the terror of

its neighbors. Whatever the flag or faith nominally in the ascendant,

Taka took her place in the opposition and invited all Adullamites to

make their home within her gates. Misdirected energy like this will,

under a strong, patient and progressive government, be directed into

more useful channels. The most turbulent will become sensible of the

necessity of eating. The larder of crags and caves is necessarily meagre

and precarious. The braves must go to market. For success at that place

of popular resort they must carry something to sell in order to be able

to buy, and they must behave themselves in 'change hours. On the latter

point the French and the peaceably disposed natives insist with

increasing unanimity. They will have to take a lesson from the vultures

which stoop with them from the hills. These know market-day as well as

the almanac or the negro butcher. Punctual to a minute, they perch at a

respectful distance from the centre of traffic, frame the dusky crowd

with a circle of feathered sentinels in uniform of light gray, and

calmly await the distribution of such shreds of eatables as even the

Kabyle cannot use. It is impossible to fancy a gentleman who restricts

himself to the occupation of fighting, buying from those at whose

expense he pursues it his weekly supply of provisions, and marching home

with his _diss_, or strings of chops and cutlets, festooned from his

spear or garlanded around his gallant brow.

Such is the drift of the times. Mankind is banded against brigandage.

Never was an ancient and honorable profession so sadly under the weather

everywhere. When it flares up into momentary life in Sicily or Attica

the newspapers seize hold of the event, a reporter is promptly on the

spot, and the bandit-chief is interviewed as coolly as though he had

merely shot his wife, bought a legislature or effected a triumphant

corner in mess pork. Such depressing influences cannot but wear down the

noblest calling. Sicily is tamed, and Circassia, the Asiatic Kabylia,

nearly so. A recent French tourist in Algeria was much struck with

certain resemblances between the two mountain-races separated by the

length of the Mediterranean and the Euxine. At the Kabyle rock-village

of Tighil-boukbair the town band turned out to receive him. It consisted

of a flute and two tambourines. Both the instruments and the airs

appeared to him identical with those to which he had listened in the

gorges of frosty Caucasus. At Tiflis he had "assisted" at a concert

almost the duplicate of the African entertainment. To make the

resemblance perfect, it would have sufficed, he says, to strip the

Caucasians to a single undergarment.

The same seeker of the picturesque describes a wayside scene

characteristic alike of landscape, dress and manners. What can be more

sensational than a draught of spring-water, under the shadow of a great

rock in a weary land, from the hollowed palm of a Kabyle girl surrounded

by her juniors arrayed in a costume that can neither be described nor

expressed, for the simple reason that it does not exist? A group like

this carries us back to within easy hail of the primal simplicity of

Eden. And a period little later than that of Adam and Eve is suggested

by the experience of the same traveller at his halt a few hours later.

As Abraham, according to the custom of his day, was ready for the three

angels with a substantial lunch, so the official Frenchman is the

beneficiary of a regulation which entitles him to an abundant _diffa_,

or provender for man, horse and attendants, supplied by the nearest

village. The Gaul is not always an angel, but his appetite is none the

worse for that. Butter does not usually appear in the bill of fare, but

its absence is amply atoned for by couscoussou, or African vermicelli,

mutton, boiled fowls, honey and sour milk. This repast is served upon

flat shallow dishes of wood or earthenware a foot and a half in

diameter, the universal platter of Kabylia, and must be a highly

acceptable surprise in the desert. Wine is not a part of the required

ration, the native grapes, though delicious when eaten, not performing

well in the press and vat. Efforts are in progress to remedy this defect

and make Algeria a wine-exporting country, but the summer heat is

probably too great, and the northern edge of the vine-zone will

doubtless maintain its supremacy over the southern, and make the Loire,

the Rhine and the Middle Danube lords of the vintage for all time. Yet

there is no more pacifying industry than wine-making, whatever may be

said of wine-drinking; and the French anxiety to turn the Kabylian caves

into wine-vaults is sensible and laudable.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

A PADUAN HOLIDAY.

On the morning of Sant' Antonio's Day we strolled through the streets of

Padua, side by side with the country-folk who had come from miles around

to offer up their prayers at the shrine of the saint. Some rode jaded

mules or were packed close in great market-wagons. Others trudged on

foot, with their dinners tied up in blue cotton handkerchiefs. There

were bronzed men in homespun, who pushed steadily on, aiding themselves

with mighty umbrellas; dark-eyed girls, with bright kerchiefs knotted

about their heads or carnations in their glossy braids; smart young

_contadini_, with their hats tied afresh with ribbons and their long

blue hose darned anew. The murmurs of the crowd, loud and merry and full

of bursts of laughter, softened into a solemn whisper as the multitude

pressed onward to the broad piazza where the sanctuary of Sant' Antonio

stands.

One by one the people lifted the leathern curtain of the church-door.

The men doffed their hats, the women told their beads. An awed hush fell

upon those simple peasants as they gazed up at the vastness of the

arches. The world of the winepress and the silk-weaving and the soup-pot

vanished from their hearts, and in its place came the illimitable calm

which holds them bowed for hours against the altar-steps. But now they

press on toward the shrine of the saint. The choir bursts into a

triumphant shout that seems to come from the throats of the bronze

angels about the altar. The chancel is a blaze of light, against which

stand two great dark bronze candelabra like sentinels of the tabernacle.

The steps before Sant' Antonio's shrine are half buried under the great

white lilies that bear his name, and the tall dark angels that keep

guard about his tomb bear sceptres of fresh lilies. There is no need of

the swinging silver censers. Myrrh and frankincense rise, sweet and

strong, from the depths of the snowy chalices. The children kneeling

about the altar bear stalks of the lilies like tall waxen tapers, that

wave to and fro over the surging heads of the multitude. There are

carved pillars around the shrine brought from Byzantium, and great white

marble heads of saints and holy men stand out in relief from the walls.

Silver lamps, beautiful with shining chains and the winged heads of

cherubim, hang from the low vault, warming all the pale figures into

life with the crimson glow of the flame within.

A little bell tinkles. There is a murmur of voices and a rustle of

garments throughout the church. The golden lights of the altar die away,

one by one. The people rise from their prayers with the wide-eyed,

unseeing gaze of those who have been wandering in a far land. They have

crossed the sea with the blessed Antonio; they have followed him into

the presence of the terrible Ezzelin, the feudal enemy of Padua; they

have heard him command the tyrant to set his captives free; they have

accompanied the saint to his hermitage among the purple olive-hills

about the city; they have struggled and suffered and died with him, and

have rejoiced at last in his apotheosis and canonization. And then, the

war being over, the race of Ezzelin expelled, and the lords of the soil,

the Carraras, strong in power, they see how the holy body is brought

into the town to protect it for ever, and a fair temple is built above

its resting-place to prove the people's gratitude to the power that set

them free. They press about the marble sarcophagus that holds his poor

skeleton, and stoop and kiss the clammy surface with reverent looks, or

take the benediction from the hand of some neighbor who stands nearer

the shrine, and utter a petition for the coming year.

See that high-bred young girl in her simple black dress, with her nurse

by her side, and her dark eyes bright and soft under their long lashes.

It is some sweet Bianca, who has left her home to escape sister

Katharine's taunts and make Heaven knows what blushing vow at the shrine

of the kind saint. See how her soft lips caress the feet of the bronze

angel with the lilies in his hand. Do you mark those bold, black,

handsome eyes devouring her face from across the crowd of low-statured

peasants? It is some wild youth from the university, you say? Ay, one

Lucentio of Pisa, a noble gentleman, whose father has sent him to Padua

to study those parts of philosophy that treat of happiness. Bianca knows

not how near her fate lies--knows not that to-morrow the new master of

music and languages will present himself at her father's door and try

his skill in translation, and carry off the sweet prize under the very

beards of the reverend wooers of Padua.

[Illustration: CHURCH OF SANT' ANTONIO.]

Oh horror! there comes sister Katharine! Blessed Virgin, help us to

escape before she sees us, or there will be no peace in the house for a

week. Come, nurse! quick! And Bianca flutters off in affright, and is

lost in the crowd.

There she comes, bonny Kate--a small, slight consequential person,

dressed in a robe of that brilliant green of the northern Italian

painters. She wants no nurse--not she! She would go from Padua to the

farthest country on Fra Paolo's map on the strength of her biting tongue

and her snapping green eyes. "Make way," she orders, "you low, vile

brutes!" and the peasants draw back and look askance at her, and the

women mutter under their breath, and the girls laugh a low laugh. See

her kiss her hand and lay it on the marble. She will not touch her lips

to it for fear of contamination. She hurls an angry oath at the

market-woman standing near with her hens tied up in her kerchief,

because she crowds so close that the hungry birds peck at the silver

galloon of her sleeve. Ay, pretty Kate, you are arrogant now. But wait a

little. Here comes Petruchio, a most unwholesome sight for a summer's

day. Get thee gone in haste, fair Kate!

See how he stalks on through the crowd, with his riding-whip in his

hand, now cutting good-humoredly at a small boy's legs, now playfully

throttling a ruddy peasant-girl with the long lash. His clothes are

torn and muddy. He wears a new hat and an old jerkin, and a pair of old

breeches, thrice turned. He has ridden into town on the sorriest nag

ever bred on the plains of Lombardy. See him stride up to the shrine of

Sant' Antonio. Do you think he will kiss that filthy stone, with the

impress of so many foul mouths upon it? He cuts at it with his whip

until the people start back in affright and the wind blows half the

lamps out, and the priest would gladly launch a malediction at his head,

but that he knows his man, for Petruchio's pranks with the clergy are

the talk of all Padua.

He is the delight of the university lads, this mad fellow from Verona.

See how they crowd about him as he stalks down the nave, and crave a

look or a salute from their bully hero! They lay bets in lecture-hours

as to whether he will succeed in taming that young shrew, Baptista's

daughter.

Be sure the Moorish prince and he of Arragon stopped with their trains

to ask the saint's protection when they went to woo fair Portia. And the

lady herself, after that good deed done in Venice, when she went praying

about at holy crosses, craved the saint's blessing on her lord,

Bassanio. He too, I wager, meditated here on his lady and his friend.

They crowd, a shadowy multitude, about the gleaming sepulchre under the

crimson glow of the silver lamps.

We wandered on, past the carved chapel-gates, the wrought bronze lamps,

the incense-clouds and the silver-white lilies, out into the tomb-filled

cloisters. There they lie, cheek by jowl--old professors from the

university in cap and gown, high up under the arches; old warriors in

armor, with their griffins and lions at their feet, and slaves bearing

scrolls with their names and exploits registered thereon. Old

councillors and syndics in robe and ruff, noble women in veil and coif,

lie side by side with some brave young heart that shed its life's blood

for united Italy.

[Illustration: PADUAN CAFFE.]

Old dragons and monsters and wide-mouthed cherubim leer down from the

gray sepulchres. From under the pointed arches, blossoming with

palm-leaves and sweet stone child-faces, young painted angels,

soft-eyed, long-haired, in pink and blue robes, smile down from the gold

background, with emblems of resurrection in their hands, like flowers

springing from the dust beneath. Here and there, high up under the

cornice of some old Gothic tomb, is a round-eyed frescoed Madonna

watching the slumbers of an old knight whose bed-curtain is upheld by

long-armed saints. Pompous and grim and fantastic and sullen by turns,

these tombs would make the heart of the stranger ache with their

mockery, but that the living sunlight streams athwart the hard stone

faces and the monster heads, and in the quadrangle of the cloister the

lilies are standing like white-robed heavenly hosts, and a well upheld

by angels rises up from the rank meadow-space. The purple clover runs

riot among the grass. There is humming of bees about the golden

lily-hearts, and a red butterfly loses its way now and then among the

graves.

There is the rustle of ghostly garments in the silent air--the fall of

shadowy feet upon the grave-lined pavements. A white-robed, shining

multitude of philosophers and sages is for ever pacing up and down the

sunny gallery discoursing of great and high things, like the blessed in

the _Paradise_ of Dante. A goodly company were they who walked there of

old. Here came Giotto, pale-browed and thoughtful, discoursing with his

friend, old Pietro di Abano, wizard, astrologer and learned physician,

of the designs he was to give him for the frescoing of the new Palace of

Reason that the city was erecting. With them, perchance, walked the

great Tuscan, for he knew and loved them both, and all three, the seer,

the poet and the painter, brooded over the inner forces of Nature and

bared their souls to revelation. Hither came Petrarch, worn with the

pomp of courts, yet flushed with modest pride at the new clerical

dignity conferred upon him by his friend the Carrara, looking back upon

his past life with philosophic calm, bidding no man judge the day till

the evening be past, yet now and again feeling the old waves of passion

surge through his heart, breathing a prayer for the repose of his dead

love and a sigh for those sweet, far-off days of his youth. Here Tasso,

the beautiful young dreamer, escaping from the dull round of the

university, threw himself down in the clover beside the angels of the

well, and saw fair white women with golden hair wreathing their arms

about him, while the bees and the butterflies laughed aloud and cried,

"Poor fool! he does not know they are only lilies." And Galileo,

teaching the while the dull youth of the school, came to gather strength

in the thought of the great finality that was to lay him low beyond the

reach of the Inquisition, and yet lift him far above all human grandeur

to mate with the stars that had been his comfort through long years of

pain. Great Paolo Sarpi, when he came down from Venice in his monk's

dress to discourse with the learned men of Padua, wandered here with his

mind intent on the mighty problems of the universe, all unthinking of

the assassin's knife that was to ease the jealousy of the Roman

cardinals. Here wandered the apprentice-boy Mantegna, poor and humble,

stealing timidly in behind the furred gowns and the gilded chains to

feast his poor little artist-soul upon the frightened young Madonnas and

wide-eyed angels that look out timidly from the arches of the

sepulchres. What grand old phantoms glide on by the side of the laughing

student-lads, and the old market-women in red kerchiefs who tell their

beads in corners, and the young girls who gather the long stalks of

seed-grass from the quadrangle and whisper to them timid questions

concerning their absent lovers!

On the great square in front of the church were booths filled with

bright flowers and early fruit and cheap sweetmeats, at which the

peasants were haggling and chaffering and filling their blue

handkerchiefs. The saints and prophets raised their hands in blessing

from the blossoming spires. Over the way, in the inn of the "Two White

Crosses," the farmers were dining. The laughter floated out through the

open windows, and a man appeared at the door and scattered cherries to

the crowd. By the side of the church was a great sepulchre, horrible

with demon-heads and pictures of the sinners in Purgatory. Above the

heads of the crowd, high on a pedestal, sat a bronze warrior on a fiery

charger. It is old Gattamelata, the _condottiere_ of the Venetian forces

in the long wars with Padua. His body lies within the church, and his

effigy is the work of one Donatello, famous in Tuscan art.

We followed the crowd along the white-walled street to the great

market-square the people call the Prato della Valle. In the middle was a

circular space of meadow, with trees above it, surrounded by a moat,

above which stand life-size statues of warriors and poets and nobles and

philosophers, blackened with the damp and mould of centuries, the folds

of their gowns battered and grass-grown, their noses missing, their eyes

put out by stones in the well-nerved hands of riotous youth, their

swords and sceptres broken short, their pointed beards snapped off into

bluntness. All around the great piazza are arches with _caffes_ and

shops under them. Off at one end rises the massive front of Santa

Giustina.

The broad paved space between the arcades and the moat of the statues

was the scene of a horse-fair. The most miserable animals that the

imagination can conjure up, all the gaunt, ghostly steeds that graze in

the pastures of legend and fable, were gathered there, neighing and

pawing as impatiently as their half-starved spirits would allow. Be sure

Petruchio bought his famous steed at the horse-fair of Padua, and that

he tried the beast's speed, as these peasants do, by driving him round

and round the statues, raising a cloud of white dust and scattering

crowds of girls and children, who screamed with terror and prayed that

the curse of Sant' Antonio might ever follow him.

Suddenly, a sound as of kettledrums and cymbals and squeaking violins

rose above the neighing and braying of the fair. In front of Santa

Giustina were a circus and a wild-beast show and a crowd of lesser

jugglers and charlatans. Outside the circus-booth, high up on a

platform, stood the clowns in their dingy fleshings and faded scarlet

trunks. They blew furiously on great brass trumpets until their cheeks

were purple and nigh to bursting under all the ghastly chalk. There were

_ballerine_ in draggled pink tarletan petticoats and low white bodices

that made their bony necks and brawny arms still browner by contrast.

They had honest, unpainted faces, and wore their hair screwed up tightly

on the tops of their heads. They bore traces of exposure to wind and

rain. Their eyes had a kind of wistful look, as though they were tired

of all this noise and foolery, and wished themselves back again on the

old olive-farms with their toiling mothers. There was something in their

dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big

drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of

grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in

threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of

sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns

to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori!

avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled

crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent,

and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little

peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped

them.

Not far from the circus, under a wooden tent, a half score of monsters

were whirling round and round in mad rivalry--fishes with enormous

mouths and mighty fins, like the terrible "Orco" of Ariosto; wild steeds

whose legs blossomed out into acanthus-leaves, like the old grotesques

that lurk under the ferns about the basins of the village fountains;

great mysterious birds, with big eyes, and golden chains about their

necks; beasts with the heads of cats and the bodies of dogs, as

monstrous and fantastic a crew, full of high-colored, confused images,

as ever rioted in the high-strung brain of some old _cinque-cento_

poet. Each of these terrible monsters had its rider--some little

golden-curled child, who clung about the neck of a cat-headed dolphin

and shrieked with delight at the danger. Some pale sewing-girl, with a

turret of powdered hair above her soft face and her black shawl thrown

like a habit around her, sat erect on her white palfrey, and for a

moment held herself the equal of the great ladies of other times whose

faces looked down upon her from the corridors of the palaces to which

she went to carry home her work, and haunted her as she sat alone in her

little chamber high up among the red roofs. Some straight-limbed

peasant-boy, with a clear-cut face and a red flower in his hat,

bestriding the black charger with fiery nostrils, felt his heart swell

with noble longing at some dim memory of the glorious deeds of the old

warriors of Padua that his grandmother had related to him many a

winter's night when the chestnuts were roasting on the hearth and the

rain was rustling through the dead vine-stalks. To him every note of the

cracked trumpet was full of intoxication: it meant war and love and

glory and heroic deeds.

There are brown-faced women in tarnished spangles tumbling on squares of

carpet, with their children crouching patiently on the blue

handkerchiefs that contain the family wardrobe, waiting for their dinner

to be earned. They are assisted by white curly poodles, with pink shaven

legs, solemn faces and long ears, which make them look like old Paduan

_marchesi_ in powdered wigs. They make the circuit of the carpet on

their hind legs, and jump through hoops, and pass the hat among the

bystanders, and watch the sleeping babies, and carry the weight of the

whole family upon their meditative shoulders.

There are tame magpies that tell the peasant-girls' fortunes by choosing

printed slips of paper from a box, and others that predict the winning

numbers of next week's lottery. Now and then an old magician passes who

has horse-hair curls reaching to his waist, a green shade over his eyes,

and carries slung about his neck a board on which sits a drugged cock

or a great black cat. He consults his familiar for answers to the

questions that are put to him. The peasants form groups about the

charlatans and tumblers and ring-throwers, and the sunlight streams over

the happy, careless crowd with a blessing. How many of them know that

where they stand the early Christians met their death with psalms upon

their lips and the palm of martyrdom in their hands?

There was one among those early martyrs, a beautiful young maiden, named

Giustina, whose life and death were full of such heroic loveliness that

in later times a mighty church was raised in her honor near the spot of

the sacrifice. The bones of all her fellow-martyrs were collected and

buried in a vault within the edifice. It is a great gray pile, cold and

solemn and austere, that rises dark behind the brilliant groups of the

fair. On either side of the great staircase crouches a stone monster,

some mysterious symbol of the early faith. Tradition gives them the

names of the paladins Roland and Oliver. The one clasps the figure of a

crusader between its mighty paws--the other, some mystical four-footed

creature. They look down upon the merry crowds with solemn unwinking

gaze, large-eyed and mysterious. They seem to put the old riddle of the

Sphinx to the traveller who pauses by their side to watch the surging

waves of human life that beat against the broad stairway of the church.

The seal of the centuries is on their broad brows. They have looked down

upon battle and tournament, upon success and defeat, upon life and

death.

The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic

_Orlando_ or _Gerusalemme_, with undertones of mirth and satire. There

the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty

castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of

oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse,

towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after

Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood

and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people

celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous

horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a

sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the

games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been

the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold

it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the

weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their

heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when

the Prato echoed with the noise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat

about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What

stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the

Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those

gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and

the terrible Visconti of Milan--all have left the traces of their iron

tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes,

and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues,

and the boys lie on the grass and play at _morra_ or sit for hours with

their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant

minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and

the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but

yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it

above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that

haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with

Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon

the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made

its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs

mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind

through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but

by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which

threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent

and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups.

[Illustration: SANTA GIUSTINA.]

Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that

contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such

sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the

Carraras. The old Italian chronicles are written with such sublime and

pathetic simplicity that human life after centuries rises up before us

with all its warm joys and sorrows, delights and agonies. We see him

first, this gallant Francesco, as a youth returning home in triumph from

a victory over the Scaligeri of Verona, welcomed by his old father, the

lord of Padua, there on the Prato, amidst the rejoicings of the people.

Then we see how, when Padua had fallen into the hands of the Visconti,

the old Francesco was kept a prisoner at Monza. His son, Francesco II.,

was also held in bondage by the Milanese, but his proud heart revolted

at the thought of his slavery, and he compassionated the sufferings of

his country, for the Visconti were hard, stern rulers. He asked

permission of the Visconti to reside in Asti, which lay near the

frontier of the Milanese territory. A little later he quitted the town,

disguised as a pilgrim and accompanied by his wife and two servants,

under pretext of visiting the shrine of Sant' Antonio at Vienne in

France. The emissaries of the Visconti follow him to Avignon, where he

treats with the pope in person and by letter with other influential

personages. Having obtained promises of assistance, he returns to Italy

by way of the coast. Moneyless, friendless, dreading arrest at every

step, burdened with a sick wife, Francesco knocks at the gate of Genoa.

The haughty city favors the Visconti, will have nothing to do with the

wanderer, and threatens him with the dungeons of the ducal palace. So

they follow the coast down to Pisa, the wife almost dead with fatigue

and privation, for they are often obliged to walk all day, and no

peasant is bold enough to offer them assistance. At last, one of their

servants, by much diplomacy, procures a miserable nag and a shaky

market-wagon filled with straw, and in this state the outcast rulers of

Padua drive up to the gates of Pisa. They are refused admittance, and

wander sorrowfully on. Outside the town they chance upon a deserted

hovel. How these princes praise God for his goodness, for now Madonna

Taddea can have a night's rest on the straw in the corner! One of the

servants steals back to the town and bribes a shopkeeper to sell him

bread and meat and wine. They build a fire and warm their poor

weatherbeaten limbs, and are right merry in a desperate, reckless way.

With the morrow they take up their march, and at last reach a friendly

city, where the wife rejoins her children. Francesco is provided with

men and arms to enable him to attack his native town, which is ready to

welcome him back. He assaults the city one midnight, surprises the

Milanese, is welcomed by the Paduans with the old shout, "Viva il

Carro!" and at dawn is encamped in triumph upon the Prato. He ruled for

a long time wisely and well, for he had known the discipline of life,

and had hungered and thirsted like the lowest of his subjects. How he

must have laughed, this stately soldier banqueting in his palace-halls,

at the thought of the night when he had been so thankful for that bit of

bread and drop of wine snatched from the grudging Pisan! And Madonna

Taddea, a blooming matron, surrounded by her children, laughed with the

tears in her eyes, and told them how one of their number had come near

being born not in a manger like our Lord, but in the open fields.

But a terrible fate hangs over this princely house. Francesco is accused

by the Venetians of violating a treaty, and war is declared against him.

The flower of the Venetian army, led by the bravest of the Venetian

generals, is sent against Padua. There is a long, fierce struggle. In

spite of famine and plague, Francesco holds out to the very last, but

one night the Venetians scale the walls and build their camp-fires on

the Prato. Francesco, with his two sons, Jacopo and Francesco, is loaded

with chains and carried to Venice, and lodged in the dungeons of the

ducal palace. There is the mockery of a trial in one of those great

painted rooms, but there is only one opinion with regard to the sentence

that will be pronounced against them. It is a terrible sight, the

proclamation of that judgment to the prisoners, nearly blind, wan and

half dead in their cells under the canal. When the executioner prepares

to read the fatal document one of them rushes at him and throws his

stool at his head. When the day of execution comes they embrace one

another, and Jacopo writes a letter to his wife, which the tenderness

and sorrow of the chronicler have handed down to us, bidding her pray

for his soul and love their children. Then they are placed upon wooden

chairs in their several dungeons, with their backs toward the door. The

executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the

Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies,

wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in

different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the

old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.

[Illustration: PRATO DELLA VALLE.]

We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades.

Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold

fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries

and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver

hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the

arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms,

stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end

by buying a life of Sant' Antonio for the old mother who has stayed at

home among the olives, and a clay pipe for the old father taking his

holiday rest on the doorstep by her side. They form bright pictures

against the open archways of the palaces beyond, through which the young

green of the gardens gleams in the sunlight. There is an air of mystery

and reserve about these broad gateways which contrasts well with the

honest, gaudy street-life under the arcades. One of these palaces may be

Baptista's, and within the unwelcome wooers of his daughters may be

feasting with him or sauntering arm-in-arm through the young leafage of

the garden, flouted by saucy Kate and shunned by sweet Bianca.

Conspicuous among the brown-faced peasants were the students, who

strolled by in groups with a lordly air of possession or gathered in

knots at the street-corners and waxed loud in discussion. They were

lithe, slender, handsome fellows, with dark eyes and fair skins and oval

faces. They had that nameless poetic grace which is the birthright of

all young Italians. The soft feminine beauty of these young Paduans,

with their dainty dress and pretty girlish ways, was something akin to

the sleepy grace of young lions. Watch that group at the corner waxing

hot over some wrong done to the leaders of their party--some one of

their political heroes arrested and cast into prison for uttering the

thoughts of all just men. See their eyes flash, their hands move in

anger and grope instinctively toward the place where they wore their

swords in their year of service. Do you say that the old Paduan flame

has died out of these young hearts? They are of the same temper as the

hearts that held out against the Venetian, the Visconti, the pope

himself--that made a hedge for the Austrian bayonets to pierce, and

yielded life and fame and fortune for their country's sake, and

languished in the hundred prisons of the northern tyrants, and were

lifted up at last in one great glad shout of victory. Let those

battle-fields among the olive-farms on the hills outside the gates tell

the story of the Paduan students. Their bright youthfulness was like

sunshine warming the gray old walls of the town. The romance of the old

Italian life seemed incarnate in their graceful shapes. Such heads as

theirs gleam out from the dark canvases that hang high in the corridors

of the old palaces--sometimes as the portrait of a long-forgotten young

knight; sometimes in the guise of a warrior-saint, some George or

Michael, painted by a master hand; sometimes as a beautiful young

ascetic in his monk's dress.

Is it strange that the pretty peasant-girls cast shy veiled glances at

the young lads that stroll by with a careless stare? For centuries they

have given pledges and broken them there under the dark arcade, and so

they will do for centuries to come. There will be other holidays and

other prayers at Antonio's shrine, and other girls will have ribbons

bought for them at the booths, and then there will be a couple of kisses

and a parting and a few tears, and now and then a broken heart. The

young men will take their diplomas and go out into the world, and rush

into the turmoil of the state and the senate and the court, and lose the

proud heroic bearing of their youth in cringing and fawning; or they

will settle down on their estates and marry the Marchesa Tal Quale, who

will have many quarterings and many bank-notes, and their beautiful

Greek outlines will disappear under the weight of fat proper to a landed

proprietor. The grand ideals of their youth will drop away from them one

by one, and they will laugh with contempt at their old student notions

of liberty and freedom for high and low.

Only some morning, when the children tell them it is Sant' Antonio's

Day, an old pain will rise in their hearts, and they will see the dear

old arcades of Padua and the little gay booths, and trustful eyes and

fresh girl-faces will start up in their memories; and when the

church-bells ring out they will hide their heads from the _marchesa_ and

the _marchesini_ and cry out aloud for the old happy student-time, when

love and hope of glory and high belief in God and man were theirs. God

pity them, those poor young things, in spite of all their glorious

youth! The beautiful promise of their spring will ripen into dull

mediocrity. They will learn to be false to themselves and the truth.

Happier are they who die there in old Padua in the fulness of their

youth and hope, and are borne to the great hall of the university and

are laid on the black-draped bier, with candles burning about them and

their fellow-students rising from their seats and bowing three times

before the corpse, and reading the funeral eulogy of him who is going to

his grave with the spirits of the great and good that have left their

footprints in the solemn halls for his mourning train.

[Illustration: PIAZZA DELLA ERBE.]

In the vestibule of the university, high up on the walls, hang the

escutcheons of the more famous of the students of past centuries, gray

with age and mould and cobweb. What colossal figures stalk about the

quadrangle and along the overhanging galleries! The mightiest minds of

Europe are among them. Every footfall makes an echo across the

centuries. Yet of all the old shadows, the one that has the greatest

charm for me is that of the gray-haired serving-man who steals along the

gallery with the bundle under his arm. Do you say it is only the

sunlight lying athwart the arches? I tell you it is Portia's faithful

servant, and he has been to the university to seek Doctor Balthazar, her

cousin, and has obtained from him a lawyer's cap and gown, and he is

hastening home to Belmont, that his mistress may don them and reach

Venice in time to save Antonio from the Jew's hands.

Sedate groups of students were seated on the terrace of the _caffe_

opposite sipping beer in gentlemanly Italian fashion. Here and there

some honest burgher family, out for a holiday, was cooling itself with

pink ices after the pilgrimage to the shrine. The female members were

clothed with garments of such exaggerated form and color that one sees

at once why Petruchio, in spite of his madness, had wit enough left to

send to Venice for the wedding-clothes, and why Katharine, after the

atrocious fashions of Padua, was disposed to be content with anything

the Veronese tailor chose to offer her.

We sauntered on to where the afternoon sun flashed red against the great

arched windows of the Palace of Reason. It is a mighty stone edifice,

with a curved glass roof over the great justice-hall, which was the

pride of mediaeval Padua. Under the pointed arches of the wide galleries

outside are gathered gray old milestones and funeral tablets and antique

busts that carry the stranger back to the days of Latin legend, when old

Antenor came up from the south and founded the city.

On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the

market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and

folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable

feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping

it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the

echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of

a weary fruit-seller. In the little _caffe_ under the arcades the idlers

seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student

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 rustling of trees or the plash of a fountain. We paused

at a wide weatherbeaten door, rang the bell and were admitted by a brown

smiling contadina, who preceded us up the narrow path that had vines

stretching out on either side, with flowering peas and beans climbing,

all crimson and scarlet blossom, over the jagged stakes. The air was

rilled with perfume and the eager buzzing of bees. At the end of the

path stood a large square house, on the portico of which sat two

blue-frocked peasants smoking and drinking red wine. There was a broad

patch of green sward in front, on which three yellow-haired children and

a small tawny dog were rolling in play. Under the great fig tree at the

side of the house sat three brown-faced women, two knitting, the third

dressing her hair. There were cool shadows under the broad leaves of the

fig tree, and bars of slanting sunlight falling through the foliage on

to the grass. At the right of the house stood a little Gothic chapel

with the sunlight streaming across the threshold. On the arch of the

door the birds were singing, and there was a growth of purple cabbages

and kingly artichokes by the side of the chapel, and low in the hollows

near by lay patches of brake and fern.

At the sunlit threshold a woman sat sewing. Before her was a table with

photographs, and a stalk of lilies in a blue earthern pitcher upon it.

The sun streamed over the sunken pavement to the neglected little altar

with its coarse mosaics and paper flowers, over the rickety little

pulpit and the traces of Byzantine gilding, and over the quaint old

effigy of the founder. It fell, soft and brilliant and caressing, on the

frescoes of Giotto. They were as pure and fresh and holy as the very

lilies; and as the lilies revealed the innermost meanings of Sant'

Antonio's Day to the hearts of the worshippers, so the frescoes

symbolized the deepest reverence, the hidden longing of the whole

brilliant, noisy Middle Age life of Padua. Their very crudeness, their

nakedness, their barrenness of accessory, their sharp, brilliant

coloring, cause them to stand out in strong relief. Never did the

mystery of Holy Writ receive better interpretation than at the hands of

Giotto. The characters in the sacred writings stand out sharp, bold,

naked, crude, and Giotto caught the bare emotional and intellectual

nature of every personage. He painted their souls and not their bodies,

and therefore he painted well. Each character might stand for the

personification of some one emotion. What can be more full of sweetness

and humble adoration than the Annunciation! what more awe-inspiring,

more faithful in its horror, than the miracle of Lazarus, where the

corpse, swathed in its bandages, stands upright among the multitude with

its hollow eyes gazing in mingled gratitude and terror at the Saviour!

what more full of grotesque sternness than the Last Judgment! what more

nobly imagined, more faithfully executed, than the Last Supper! The

simplicity and sublimity of revelation shine down from them, and make

the beholder speechless with the thought of divine love.

Let us go no farther. Let us end our holiday here. Under the altar

sleeps the old knight who built the chapel, and outside the door the

peasants sit upon the threshold of his palace. The butterflies saunter

in on the sun-filled breeze and flutter about the lilies on the table

and the painted lilies on the wall. The dark sweet faces shine down from

the frescoes, as they have shone down upon the worshippers through the

ages, with a blessing on their holy, sentient mouths. A deep reverent

hush is in the air--a nameless expectancy fills our hearts. We stand on

the threshold of all that is best and worthiest in the human life of

centuries, with the shades of the great and noble pressing about us. The

announcing angel has brought unto us the lilies of revelation, and we

feel with glad humility that we are for ever one with all the high souls

that have joined earth with heaven.

CHARLOTTE ADAMS.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

CHAPTER VI.

A year after Laidley's death, Judge Rhodes, being in New York,

breakfasted with Mr. Neckart. He noticed that the editor had grown lean

and sallow. "And God knows he had no good looks to spare," smoothing

down his own white beard over his comfortable paunch. Something, too, of

that easy frankness which had made Neckart so popular was gone; no topic

interested him; his eye was secretive and irritable; he spoke and moved

under the constant pressure of self-control. The judge, as he watered

his claret, eyed the dark face opposite to him critically. "Now, I

never," he thought, "saw a sign of ill-temper or cruelty in that man.

Yet I have a queer fancy that if the reins were once taken off he could

not master himself again. It must be devilishly uncomfortable, holding

one's self in in that way," the last morsel of quail sliding down his

throat unctuously. "_I_ can let myself out without danger."

"Why, you eat nothing! The campaign's been too much for you, Mr.

Neckart," he said aloud. "You've run down terribly in the last year.

Always the way. You young men make too many spurts in the first heat,

and break down before the middle of the race. Well, that's our American

policy. But the American physique won't stand it."

"Do you only mean that I have broken down physically, or do you see any

change in my work? The leading articles are mine, you know. Don't be

afraid to be frank."

"Well, now that you ask me--Your articles are more forcible lately, more

popular: they bring down the galleries, eh? But it's a sledge-hammer

force, it's vehemence, d'ye see? There's a lack of that moderation, that

repressed power, in which was your real strength. You asked me to be

frank?"

"Yes. And I knew just what you would say. Well, what must be, is!" with

a gesture which dismissed the subject.

"Nonsense! It's your nervous system that needs toning, that's all. If

our side goes in, get a foreign mission--some warm, lazy place on the

Mediterranean, say. Rest a few years, and when you come home take an

easier pace for the rest of your life. Lord bless you, boy! I've been

through it all. When I was a young fellow--mere bundle of nerves,

high-strung, sir--high-strung! Ambition, love! Constitution wouldn't

stand it!--Bit of the steak, John, rare.--Joe Rhodes, I said, either

come down to the jog-trot level or die. So here I am! Good for forty

years yet, please God! When you are my age you may be just what I am, if

you choose."

Neckart's eye twinkled: "Try the birds, judge."

He made an effort after that to resume his old careless manner, and the

judge had tact enough to drop the subject. But he was not deceived.

"There's more here than meets the eye," he said shrewdly to himself.

"Neckart has had a blow that has made him stagger. He has worked like a

horse in a treadmill. But he has the constitution to stand it. Functions

in healthy condition--tremendous vital power. Either hereditary disease

is at work, or some morbid passion, or he would not have given way."

He urged him to eat with tender solicitude, even gave him his famous

recipe for a salad. No matter what our sympathy, our help for each other

can seldom come any closer than skin or stomach, after all.

"By the way," he said presently, "I hear that Swendon has bought a place

up the Hudson. Can you tell me anything about him?"

"I meet him everywhere," said Neckart. "The old man is failing fast. But

he takes life just as he always did--like a boy let loose for the

holidays."

"And his daughter?"

"She never comes into town: she is not a woman of society."

"I remember the little Swede was no favorite of yours," noticing a

certain reserve in Neckart's tone. "But I had an object in asking for

her. Of course you would not be likely to know much about them: they are

out of your line."

"I have met the captain and his daughter several times during the year,"

said Neckart. "They were camping on the Maine coast last summer, and I

stumbled into their tent one day. Miss Swendon fancied her father would

grow strong on a diet of fish of his own catching. When the cold weather

set in she took him to St. Augustine. I ran against him by the old fort

the very morning I arrived, and in the spring we met at Omaha, and made

the overland trip to California together. There is no kind of air and no

kind of amusement which she has not tried, since she had the means, to

give the old man his health back again. To no purpose, however."

"Very odd!" the judge nodded mysteriously. "Very odd indeed about that

property! Laidley told me the very night before he died that he had made

a will leaving it in charity. Now, Jane inherited by virtue of a will

made two years before. No other forthcoming. I suppose remorse seized

him _in articulo mortis_. There was a curious thing occurred in that

last interview of mine with Laidley.--How can I see Swendon?"

interrupting himself. "Where is their house?"

Mr. Neckart hesitated a moment: "I am going there this evening to dine

and spend the night, and I will take you with me. It will be a surprise

which the captain will like."

"The very thing! Precisely! The truth is, Neckart--light a cigar--the

truth is," lowering his voice and leaning over the table, "Laidley

exacted a half promise from me that night which troubles me. The fellow

died forthwith, you see, and so clenched it on me. He had a plan for

Miss Swendon's future, and asked me to forward it. I thought he was

going to cheat the girl, and paid little attention to it. But he did

the clean thing after all, and then died promptly. I must say Laidley

acted in a much more decent and gentlemanlike way than I expected. So,

now I feel as if I owed it to the fellow to keep my word."

Mr. Neckart nodded. He asked no questions, but scanned the judge's

flabby face narrowly. Rhodes lifted one leg on to the other knee and

nursed it. It was his confidential attitude.

"It's a delicate matter, you see. Van Ness is concerned."

"Van Ness, the antiquarian?"

"Oh, he's more than that! You don't suppose a man of his breadth of

intellect confines himself to old bricks and dry bones? Why, God bless

you! Pliny Van Ness is the final authority in Philadelphia on new

singers or pictures or cracked teapots or great religious or

philanthropic reforms. If he were taken from it, the underpinnings of

that town would be knocked away, and it would fall flat."

"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory

education in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was

trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining

population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great

man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to

purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish

scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"

The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed

thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence

for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of

perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a

marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the

matter--bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort

of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in

Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."

"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of

the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well

managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the

whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be

paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor

judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the

markets of Cairo.

"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has

occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van

Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some

prepossession in favor of the little girl."

"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.

"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a

match, now, really, you know, Van Ness is--The idea that he was

favorable to it was suggested to me again yesterday when he proposed

that we should look up the captain and call upon him. He is not a man

who usually makes advances."

"Is Mr. Van Ness in New York with you?"

"Yes, certainly. I thought you knew that."

"And you propose to take him out to-night?"

"Why, that seemed a good plan. Unless you have some objection?"

"What objection can I have? What does it matter to me?" He stooped to

pat his dog, that sat upright watching his face.

"Surely, that is that savage wolf-hound of Miss Swendon's?"

"Yes. He divides his time between us." After a few minutes he said, "You

seem to anticipate no difficulty in the way of your conquering hero? Yet

Miss Swendon by no means belongs to the warm-blooded, susceptible order

of women. This Van Ness, as I remember him, is a starved,

insignificant-looking fellow."

"Oh, on the contrary! He has a very noble presence. Pliny is tall, with

much dignity of carriage."

"Pompous, eh? 'I am Sir Oracle'?"

"Nothing of the kind. Rather deprecating manner, with a calm face,

beaming blue eyes, and abundant fair hair and beard. The very finest of

Saxon types, in fact."

"Ah? But these reformers are apt to be underbred, irritable, with nasty

peculiarities of habits and manner which they never have thought it

worth while to cure. I suppose your friend is like his brethren?"

"Now, Neckart, just wait until you see Van Ness. You'll be charmed, or

I've no judgment. Most men are, and all women," laughing significantly.

They rose at the moment. As they left the room Neckart caught sight in a

mirror of his own dwarfed bulk and the massive head set in its black

mane. He stopped and looked for an instant at himself fixedly, a thing

which he had not done perhaps for years, and then walked on in silence

beside the judge. When they parted in the street he wrote a line on a

card and gave it to him.

"In case I am not able to go out on the same train with you, this is the

route to the farm," he said.

He could scarcely be courteous. He was in a rage of indignation. Not, of

course, that it mattered to him whether Jane married this or any other

man whom she loved. She was only an acquaintance--more perhaps--his

little friend. She must marry: he had thought of that often; and she

would love--with a strength and fidelity beyond that of any woman he had

ever known. He had often thought of that too. When the time came--years

hence, perhaps--he would consult with her father as to the man. They

must be satisfied that he would make her happy--they two. It must be a

careful, cautious, slow matter. He might surely claim so much of a

guardianship over her! He had studied her character very carefully, and

appreciated it as a rare and delicate one; and he was very fond of the

captain--very fond of the captain. But as for the plan of marriage--Mr.

Neckart understood his own disgust at the judge, and accounted for it

naturally. He had but little of the ordinary chivalric belief in woman's

modesty and purity. Much knowledge of female lobbyists and literary

tramps and champagne-tippling belles had shaken his faith, probably.

"But this girl is the most innocent, sincerest thing God ever made," he

said. "She is clean in thought and body and word."

In those long days on the Maine coast, or by the sea-wall at St.

Augustine, or crossing the interminable mountain-ranges or alkali

deserts, he had had time to read this candid soul page by page: her

clear skin and liquid eyes were not more transparent than her thoughts.

All through that day's work a young noble figure moved like a shadow--a

woman with the brave blue eyes, the ruddy lips, the grand

unconsciousness of the great women of her race. The blood of Aslauga and

Ingeborg was in her veins. So strong was this feeling upon him, that

always, when he was making ready to meet her, he bathed and arrayed

himself as if he was going to take part in the rites of a church or some

sacred place. "'So white, so fair, so sweet was she!'" he sang softly to

himself. And guzzling Rhodes, with his oily laugh and fat hands, meant

to show her off, exhibit her fine points to this Admirable Crichton of

morality, and persuade him to marry her! Was there any danger that she

would love or marry him? She was undoubtedly dull in perception of

character: had she not always made a demigod of the silly old captain?

The finest vessels were always first to break themselves to pieces

against some earthen pitcher.

He made haste to take an early afternoon train. He would see his friends

again before Rhodes arrived.