The narrow streets were alive with people; and the drivers of vehicles everywhere seemed to drive as if their lives depended on it. Suddenly we turned into a _piazza_ very modern and very different from that of Santa Maria Novella; and then we were at the hotel door. It was a nice-looking square, as I thought, not very large,--clean and gracious. To my delight I found that my room opened directly upon a balcony which overlooked the Arno, and that from it, sitting in a chair, I could command all of that remarkable prospect of high-piled medieval houses hanging over the water’s edge. It was beautiful. The angelus bells were ringing; there was a bright glow in the west where the sun was going down; the water of the stream was turquoise blue, and the walls of all the houses seemingly brown. I stood and gazed, thinking of the peculiarly efficient German manager I had encountered, the German servants who were in charge of this hotel, and the fact that Florence had long since radically changed from what it was. A German porter came and brought my bags; a German maid brought hot water; a German clerk took my full name and address for the register, and possibly for the police; and then I was at liberty to unpack and dress for dinner. Instead I took a stroll out along the stream-banks to study the world of jewelry shops which I saw there, and the stands for flowers, and the idling crowd. I dare not imagine what the interest of Florence would be to any one who did not know her strange and variegated history, but I should think, outside of the surrounding scenic beauty, it would be little or nothing. Unless one had a fondness for mere quaintness and gloom and solidity, it would in a way be repulsive, or at best dreary. But lighted by the romance, the tragedy, the lust, the zealotry, the brutality and the artistic idealism that surrounds such figures as Dante, the Medici, Savonarola, Donatello, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and the whole world of art, politics, trade, war, it takes on a strange luster to me, that of midnight waters lighted by the fitful gleams of distant fires. I never think of it without seeing in my mind’s eye the Piazza della Signoria as it must have looked on that day in 1494 when that famous fiasco, in regard to “the test by fire,” entered into between Savonarola and the Franciscan monks, took place,--those long, ridiculous processions of Dominicans and Franciscans, Savonarola bearing the chalice aloft; or that other day when Charles VIII of France at the instance of Savonarola paraded the street in black helmet with mantle of gold brocade, his lance leveled before him, his retainers gathered about him, and then disappointed the people by getting off his horse and showing himself to be the insignificant little man that he was, almost deformed and with an idiotic expression of countenance. Neither can I forget the day that Savonarola was beheaded and burnt for his religious zealotry in this same Piazza della