We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades. Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms, stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end by buying a life of Sant' Antonio for the old mother who has stayed at home among the olives, and a clay pipe for the old father taking his holiday rest on the doorstep by her side. They form bright pictures against the open archways of the palaces beyond, through which the young green of the gardens gleams in the sunlight. There is an air of mystery and reserve about these broad gateways which contrasts well with the honest, gaudy street-life under the arcades. One of these palaces may be Baptista's, and within the unwelcome wooers of his daughters may be feasting with him or sauntering arm-in-arm through the young leafage of the garden, flouted by saucy Kate and shunned by sweet Bianca. Conspicuous among the brown-faced peasants were the students, who strolled by in groups with a lordly air of possession or gathered in knots at the street-corners and waxed loud in discussion. They were lithe, slender, handsome fellows, with dark eyes and fair skins and oval faces. They had that nameless poetic grace which is the birthright of all young Italians. The soft feminine beauty of these young Paduans, with their dainty dress and pretty girlish ways, was something akin to the sleepy grace of young lions. Watch that group at the corner waxing hot over some wrong done to the leaders of their party--some one of their political heroes arrested and cast into prison for uttering the thoughts of all just men. See their eyes flash, their hands move in anger and grope instinctively toward the place where they wore their swords in their year of service. Do you say that the old Paduan flame has died out of these young hearts? They are of the same temper as the hearts that held out against the Venetian, the Visconti, the pope himself--that made a hedge for the Austrian bayonets to pierce, and yielded life and fame and fortune for their country's sake, and languished in the hundred prisons of the northern tyrants, and were lifted up at last in one great glad shout of victory. Let those battle-fields among the olive-farms on the hills outside the gates tell the story of the Paduan students. Their bright youthfulness was like sunshine warming the gray old walls of the town. The romance of the old Italian life seemed incarnate in their graceful shapes. Such heads as theirs gleam out from the dark canvases that hang high in the corridors of the old palaces--sometimes as the portrait of a long-forgotten young knight; sometimes in the guise of a warrior-saint, some George or