to whatever destination they wanted, their knapsacks and rifles falling to proud bearers too; while the women clapped from the upper windows, the shrewd shopkeepers cheered from their doorways, and the crowd which followed and surrounded the hero every moment increased.  As for the heroes, they looked for the most part a good deal less foolish than Englishmen would have done; but here and there was one whose expression suggested that the Turks were nothing to this.  One poor fellow had his coat dragged from his back and torn into a thousand souvenirs.

The restaurants of Florence are those of a city where the natives are thrifty and the visitors dine in hotels.  There is one expensive high-class house, in the Via Tornabuoni—­Doney e Nipoti or Doney et Neveux—­where the cooking is Franco-Italian, and the Chianti and wines are dear beyond belief, and the venerable waiters move with a deliberation which can drive a hungry man—­and one is always hungry in this fine Tuscan air—­to despair.  I like better the excellent old-fashioned purely Italian food and Chianti and speed at Bonciani’s in the Via de Panzani, close to the station.  These twain are the best.  But it is more interesting to go to the huge Gambrinus in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, because so much is going on all the time.  One curious Florentine habit is quickly discovered and resented by the stranger who frequents a restaurant, and that is the system of changing waiters from one set of tables to another; so that whereas in London and Paris the wise diner is true to a corner because it carries the same service with it, in Florence he must follow the service.  But if the restaurants have odd ways, and a limited range of dishes and those not very interesting, they make up for it by being astonishingly quick.  Things are cooked almost miraculously.

The Florentines eat little.  But greediness is not an Italian fault.  No greedy people would have a five-syllabled word for waiter.

Continuing along the Via dell’ Arcivescovado, which after the Piazza becomes the Via Celimana, we come to that very beautiful structure the Mercato Nuovo, which, however, is not so wonderfully new, having been built as long ago as 1547-1551.  Its columns and arched roof are exquisitely proportioned.  As a market it seems to be a poor affair, the chief commodity being straw hats.  For the principal food market one has to go to the Via d’Ariento, near S. Lorenzo, and this is, I think, well worth doing early in the morning.  Lovers of Hans Andersen go to the Mercato Nuovo to see the famous bronze boar (or “metal pig,” as it was called in the translation on which I was brought up) that stands here, on whose back the little street boy had such adventures.  The boar himself was the work of Pietro Tacca (1586-1650), a copy from an ancient marble original, now in the Uffizi, at the top of the entrance stairs; but the pedestal with its collection of creeping things is modern.  The Florentines who stand in the market niches are Bernardo Cennini, a goldsmith and one of Ghiberti’s assistants, who introduced printing into Florence in 1471 and began with an edition of Virgil; Giovanni Villani, who was the city’s first serious historian, beginning in 1300 and continuing till his death in 1348; and Michele Lando, the wool-carder, who on July 22nd, 1378, at the head of a mob, overturned the power of the Signory.