“Certainly they are nothing of the kind.  The Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory.”

“But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino’s castle?”

“Nothing of the sort.  His castle in that case would have been outside of the old city walls.”

“And those tortures and the prisons are all”—­

“Things got up for show.  No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P——­ cannot conceive.  But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons.”

“But the custodian—­how could he lie so?”

Our friend shrugged his shoulders.  “Eh! easily.  And perhaps he even believed what he said.”

The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet.  Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable.  We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.

A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH’S HOUSE AT ARQUA.

I.

We said, during summer days at Venice, when every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling bathers, “As soon as it rains we will go to Arqua.”  Remembering the ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness.  So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky.

We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arqua upon the road to Ferrara.  I believe no rule of human experience was violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to rain violently the whole day.  We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch’s house actually began.

The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather.  There was not yet enough of it to stir the

  “Tears from the depth of some divine despair;”