the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century.  She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico.  When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages.  Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo.  It had just happened that Balbo’s son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son.  At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia’s rejected suitor encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his successful rival.  The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated.  Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children.

This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an habitue of the caffe in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollection.  He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the caffe playing solitaire.  He talked with no one, saluted no one.  He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire.  There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years.

V.

POSSAGNO, CANOVA’S BIRTHPLACE.

It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried.  It was called “Il Mondo,” and it had everything in it that heart could wish.  Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti.  During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano.  It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fictitious