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.