The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic _Orlando_ or _Gerusalemme_, with undertones of mirth and satire. There the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse, towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when the Prato echoed with the noise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and the terrible Visconti of Milan--all have left the traces of their iron tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes, and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues, and the boys lie on the grass and play at _morra_ or sit for hours with their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups. [Illustration: SANTA GIUSTINA.]