"Oh, don't, Beechy! You make my blood run cold!" cried Aunt Kathryn. "Do let's talk of something else quickly. How gracefully the vines are trained here, draped along those rows of trees in the meadows. It's much prettier than ordinary vineyards. You might imagine fairies playing tag under these arbours." "Or fauns chasing nymphs," said Sir Ralph. "No doubt they did a few years ago and caught them too." "I'm glad they don't now," replied Aunt Kathryn, "or this would be no fit place for ladies to motor." But I wasn't glad, for the whole country was one wide background for a pre-Raphaelite picture, and the mountains to which Aunt Kathryn had applied so insulting a simile were even grander in size and nobler in shape than before. We had seen many old chateaux (though never a surfeit), but the best of all had been reserved for to-day. Far away on our left, as we drove towards Padua, it rose above the little town that crawled to the foot of the castle's hill to beg protection; and it was exactly like a city painted by Mantegna or Carpaccio, Mr. Barrymore said. Up the hill ran the noblest and biggest wall that an Old Master's imagination could have conceived. Many men might walk on it abreast; and at every few yards it bristled with sturdy watch-towers, not ruined, but looking as ready to defy the enemy to-day as they were six hundred years ago. The culmination was the castle itself, so magnificently proportioned, so worthily proud of its place, that it seemed as if the spirit of the Middle Ages were there embodied, gazing down in haughty resignation upon a new world it did not even wish to understand. The name of the castle was Soave; but when I heard that nothing startling enough to please me had happened there, I wouldn't know its history, for my fancy was equal to inventing one more thrilling. There was plentiful sensation, though, in the stories the Chauffeulier could tell of Napoleon's battles and adventures in this neighbourhood. I listened to them eagerly, especially to that which covered his falling into a marsh while fighting the Austrians, and standing there, unable to get out, while the battle of Arcole raged around him. We were at the point of the rescue and the victory of the French, when we arrived at another gateway, another octroi, another city, to enter which was like driving straight into an old, old picture. In a long street of palaces, all with an elusive family resemblance to one another, we paused for consultation. This was Vicenza, the birthplace and beloved town of Palladio; these palaces with fronts crusted with bas relief; these Corinthian pillars, these Arabesque balconies, these porticoes that might have been stolen from Greek temples, all had been designed by Palladio the Great. And the beautiful buildings seemed to say pensively, like lovely court ladies whose day is past, "We are not what we were. Time has changed and broken us, it is true; but even so we are worth seeing."