At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arqua) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint’s day, and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like.  There was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or selling.  I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed commercially.

When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only three miles from Arqua.

II.

Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the road a stream of living water.  There was no other barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.

When we began to climb the hill to Arqua, and the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot.  The great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always.  It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills.  Ohio hills?  When I looked again it was the storied Euganean group.  But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?

I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above?  I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of—­looking, in a word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.

Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village inn.  Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits.  His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company.  He merely offered to guide us to Petrarch’s house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant.