The Dantescan pilgrim, who, among his first objects at Siena, runs to visit this precious fountain, finds, not without a feeling of disappointment, a square mass of heavy ugly brickwork, supported on some three or four unornamented arches on each of its four sides. Within is a large tank, also of brick, the sides of which rise about two feet above the level of the soil; and this is perennially filled by a cool and pure spring from the sandstone side of the mountain, which there rises in a broken cliff immediately behind the ungraceful, though classic building. Descending the steep street in search of this poet-hallowed spot, with the Cathedral behind him, and St. Dominic's church high on its peak above and in front of him, the visitor finds that he is passing through a part of the city inhabited by the poorer classes of its people. And near the bottom of the hill, and around the fountain itself, it is manifest to more senses than one, that a colony of tanners and dyers is still established on the same site which their forefathers occupied, when Giacomo Benincasa was one of the guild. The general aspect of this remote and low-lying corner of the city is squalid and repulsive. Eyes and nose are alike offended by all around them. And the stranger, who has been attracted thither by the well-remembered name of "Fontebranda," hastens to reclimb his way to the upper part of the town; probably unconscious, perhaps uncaring, that within a few yards of him lies another object of pilgrimage, classic after another fashion, and hallowed to the feelings of a far more numerous body of devotees. For a little way up the hill, on the left hand side of the poverty-stricken street, as one goes upwards, among the miserable and filthy-looking skin-dressers' houses, is still to be seen that of Giacomo Benincasa, in which his daughter Catherine, the future Saint, was born, in the year 1347, and lived dining the greater portion of her short career. [Sidenote: CATHERINE'S BIRTH-PLACE.] The veneration of her fellow citizens during the two centuries which followed her death, has not permitted the dwelling to remain altogether as it was when she inhabited it. The street front has been sufficiently altered to indicate to any passenger, that it belongs to some building of more note than the poor houses around it. Two stories of a "loggia," or arcade, of dark brick, supported on little marble columns,—four arches above, and four below,—run along the front of the upper part of the building. On the ground-floor, a large portal, like that of a chapel, such as in fact now occupies the entire basement story, sufficiently shows that the building within is no longer a poor dyer's habitation. On the side is a smaller door opening on a handsome straight stone staircase, eight feet wide. By this entrance visitors are admitted to gratify for an equal fee their Catholic devotion or heretic curiosity.