Signor Tassini says that while Petrarch lived here he often enjoyed the society of his natural daughter, Francesca, who once, in this house, and in the absence of her father, received the sad news of the death, at her home in Pavia, of her infant child; when Boccaccio acted as comforter, and tried in vain to stay her maternal tears. Mr. Horatio F. Brown and Mr. Howells both quote a letter, written in Latin, by Petrarch to his friend Pietro Bolognese, in which he describes a famous festival held in the Piazza S. Marco to celebrate a victory over the Greeks in Candia. The poet was seated in the place of honor, at the right of the Doge, in the gallery of the Cathedral, and in front of the bronze horses; and he tells of the many youths, decked in purple and gold, ruling with the rein, and urging with the spur, their horses in the then unpaved square, and watched by a throng of spectators so great that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. There is not a horse in all Venice to-day; the youths wear ulsters when it is cold, and very little of anything when it is hot; and every grain of barley which falls to the ground is ravenously devoured by the doves, who alone of all the Venetians wear the purple now. If tradition, for the once, speaks truly, these very doves are the direct descendants of the carrier-pigeons which brought to Admiral Dandolo information from spies in Candia leading to the capture of the island, and which may have received grains of barley from the hand of Petrarch himself. As such do the doves of the present day receive grains of barley from me. Mr. Brown, in his admirable study of _The Venetian Printing Press_, says that Aldus is not known, of a certainty, to have lived in the house, or even on the site of the house, No. 2311 Rio Terra Secondo, in the parish of S. Agostino, which is marked with a tablet [Illustration: THE HOUSE OF PETRARCH]