The authenticity of this legend, is more than doubtful, because it exists elsewhere, as I have read it, being unable to give my authority; but unless my memory deceives me, it goes back to classic times, and may be found in some such work as that of Philostratus _de Vita Apollonii_ or Grosius. Neither am I well assured, to judge from the source whence I had it, that it is current among the people, though no great measure of credulity is here required, since it may be laid down as a rule, with rarest exception, that there is no old Roman tale of the kind which may not be unearthed with pains and patience among old Tuscan peasant women. However, the _shield_ is still on the corner of the Via Calzaioli, albeit one of the nymphs on it has been knocked or worn away. Thus even _fates_ must yield in time to fate. I have in a note to another legend spoken of the instinct which seems to lead children or grown people to associate wells with indwelling fairies, to hear a voice in the echo, and see a face in the reflection in the still water. Keats has beautifully expressed it in “Endymion”: “Some mouldered steps lead into this cool cell Far as the slabbed margin of a well, Whose patient level peeps its crystal eye Right upward through the bushes to the sky. . . . Upon a day when thus I watched . . . behold! A wonder fair as any I have told— The same bright face I tasted in my sleep Smiling in the clear well. My heart did leap Through the cool depth. . . . Or ’tis the cell of Echo, where she sits And babbles thorough silence till her wits Are gone in tender madness, and anon Faints into sleep, with many a dying tone.” “In which tale,” writes the immortal Flaxius, “there is a pretty allegory. Few there are who know why truth is said to be at the bottom of a well; but this I can indeed declare to you. For as a mirror was above all things an emblem of truth, because it shows all things exactly as they are, so the water in a well was, as many traditions prove, considered as a mirror, because looking into it we see our face, which we of course most commonly see in a glass, and this disk of shining water resembles in every way a hand-mirror. And for this reason a mirror was also regarded as expressing life itself, for which reason people so greatly fear to break them. So in the Latin, _Velut in speculo_, and in the Italian, _Vero come un specchio_—‘True as a mirror,’ we have the same idea. And a poet has written, ‘Mirrored as in a well,’ and many have re-echoed the same pretty fancy. “Which reminds me that in the Oberpfalz or Upper Palatinate maidens were wont to go to a well by moonlight, and if on looking therein they saw their own faces, they believed that they would soon be happily married. But if a cloud darkened the moon and they saw nothing, then they would die old maids. But luckiest of all was it if they fancied they saw a man’s face, for this would be the future husband himself.