I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arqua, and I rang at the parish priest’s door to beg of him some account of the place, if any were printed.  But already at one o’clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and must on no account be roused till four.  It is but a quiet life men lead in Arqua, and their souls are in drowsy hands.  The amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful days.  As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arqua in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance.  I thought it must be that his “bowels of compassion were well-rounded,” and, making sure of absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.

Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arqua, I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o’clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that hour?  Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me.  He was not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner.  At the village inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest of Arqua by the former’s courtesy.  Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted to see—­no other than Leoni’s “Life of Petrarch,” to which I have already referred.  Courtesy is the blood in an Italian’s veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arqua, seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging.  But he continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arqua, and I did not see him then.

I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream running from the “Fountain of Petrarch.”  Their arms and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work.  Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone.  To a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick.  Above their foreheads the hair was cut short, and their “back hair” was gathered into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.

The Piazza della Fontana, in Arqua, is a place some fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort.  In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers.  It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an urchin’s cheek.