In another part of the garden they encountered a very humorous experience, for, as they were walking about therein and marking its curiosities, the gardener for a certain purpose withdrew, and while they stood gazing at some marble statues, there sprang up under their feet and between their legs an infinite number of tiny jets of water, so minute that they resembled exactly drops of rain, and with this they were sprinkled all over. It was produced by the working of subterranean machinery which the gardener, being two hundred paces distant, set in motion. So delicately was it constructed that he was able from where he was stationed to raise and depress the outflow as he willed. The same device is to be found in divers other places. They saw also the great fountain which finds a channel through two vast bronze figures, one of which, clasped by the other in a violent embrace, seems half-fainting, and, with head thrown back, belches forth the stream from his mouth. So great is the force that the column of water rises some thirty-seven fathoms above the top of these figures, which are themselves twenty feet high. Here is a little chamber made amongst the boughs of an evergreen tree of a much more luxuriant growth than any other they had yet seen. It is entirely clipped out of the green boughs of the tree aforesaid, so that there is no prospect to be got therefrom, save through certain apertures which it has been necessary to make here and there, by clearing away the branches. In the midst of the chamber, from pipes which are concealed, rises a fountain which is set in the middle of a marble table. By a certain device the water made music, but this they were not able to hear, for it would have been too late for people who had to return to the city. They saw likewise the coat-of-arms of the duke over a gateway, excellently formed from the branches of trees fostered and restrained in their natural growth by certain ligaments which could scarcely be discerned. Their visit was paid in the season when gardens have their worst aspect, wherefore the wonder was all the greater. Besides the things described above they saw a beautiful grotto, in which were fashioned all sorts of animals after nature, every one of which gave out the water of the fountains, either from the beak or the wing, or the talon, or the ear, or the nostril. I forgot to say that in the palace of this prince there is the figure of a quadruped in bronze after nature, of a very strange form, which is set up on a column.[57] The foreparts are scaly, and upon the back are members of a fashion I cannot describe--somewhat like horns. The story is that it was discovered in a cave in the adjacent mountains and brought hither alive several years ago. We saw likewise the palace of the Queen Mother[58]; and M. de Montaigne, according to his wont, was minded to test the capabilities of the city by looking at rooms which were to let and boarding-houses, but he found none worth notice.