On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of a weary fruit-seller. In the little _caffe_ under the arcades the idlers seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student saunters by, gazing dreamily up at the graceful galleries. Tired mothers hasten across the piazza, dragging their tired but happy children after them. The mothers are red in the face with the heat, their bonnets are nigh to falling off, and their mighty castles of hair are shaken to their foundations. The children's hands are filled with dead lilies and hard cakes, and their faces are aglow with melted sugar and happiness. They have a weary air, as through surfeit of sweets. They will welcome the work-day minestra to-night when they reach their homes high up among the terraces and the chimneys and the clothes-lines. Ah, well! Sant' Antonio's Day is drawing to a close. Those children with the lilies in their hands carried me back to the old religious masque of centuries ago. The chroniclers tell us that every year, in the month of the Blessed Virgin, a procession formed here on the piazza in front of the palace composed of all the civil dignitaries, the priests, the nobles and the different guilds. At their head went two children beautiful as seraphim, the one dressed in snowy white, with golden hair falling on his shoulders and a sceptre of white lilies in his hand--the angel of the Annunciation; the other, clothed in a flowing blue garment, with long brown hair escaping from under her golden crown--the Blessed Virgin herself. So they passed on, accompanied by music and the shouts of the people, through the streets of Padua, that were hung with crimson arazzi and tapestry from the looms of Flanders and curtains of cloth of gold. Onward they went to the vineyard outside the town, in which stands Giotto's chapel. At the gate the procession paused, and there was a colloquy in rhyme between the Virgin and the angel, and all the dignitaries listened with profound seriousness, and a mass was chanted within the chapel, and bombs were exploded, and bells rung, and there were singing and shouting and feasting throughout Padua.