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.