and for the cathedral, with Filippino’s dissolute father’s frescoes in it, the Salome being one of the most interesting pre-Botticelli scenes in Italian art.  If only it had its colour what a wonder of lightness and beauty this still would be!  But probably most people are attracted to Prato chiefly by Donatello and Michelozzo’s outdoor pulpit, the frieze of which is a kind of prentice work for the famous cantoria in the museum of the cathedral at Florence, with just such wanton boys dancing round it.

On Good Friday evening in the lovely dying April light I paid thirty centimes to be taken by tram to Grassina to see the famous procession of the Gesu Morto.  The number of people on the same errand having thrown out the tram service, we had very long waits, while the road was thronged with other vehicles; and the result was I was tired enough—­having been standing all the way—­when Grassina was reached, for festivals six miles out of Florence at seven in the evening disarrange good habits.  But a few pence spent in the albergo on bread and cheese and wine soon restored me.  A queer cavern of a place, this inn, with rough tables, rows and rows of wine flasks, and an open fire behind the bar, tended by an old woman, from which everything good to eat proceeded rapidly without dismay—­roast chicken and fish in particular.  A strapping girl with high cheek bones and a broad dark comely face washed plates and glasses assiduously, and two waiters, with eyes as near together as monkeys’, served the customers with bewildering intelligence.  It was the sort of inn that in England would throw up its hands if you asked even for cold beef.

The piazza of Grassina, which, although merely a village, is enterprising enough to have a cinematoscope hall, was full of stalls given chiefly to the preparation and sale of cake like the Dutch wafelen, and among the stalls were conjurors, cheap-jacks, singers, and dice throwers; while every moment brought its fresh motor-car or carriage load, nearly all speaking English with a nasal twang.  Meanwhile every one shouted, the naphtha flared, the drums beat, the horses champed.  The street was full too, chiefly of peasants, but among them myriad resolute American virgins, in motor veils, whom nothing can ever surprise; a few American men, sceptical, as ever, of anything ever happening; here and there a diffident Englishwoman and Englishman, more in the background, but destined in the end to see all.  But what I chiefly noticed was the native girls, with their proud bosoms carried high and nothing on their heads.  They at any rate know their own future.  No rushing over the globe for them, but the simple natural home life and children.

In the gloom the younger girls in white muslin were like pretty ghosts, each followed by a solicitous mother giving a touch here and a touch there—­mothers who once wore muslin too, will wear it no more, and are now happy in pride in their daughters.  And very little girls too—­mere tots—­wearing wings, who very soon were to join the procession as angels.