a stick.  They sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms.  Many of the women were young,—­though they were of all ages,—­and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge.  She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched.  Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls.  “They are drawing the prettiest,” he said, at which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen.  Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing, and absorbing every stroke as it was made.  When the book was closed and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone out.  We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the women’s song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away.

In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet.  One of its bounds is the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air.  Down the slow, dull current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mississippi.  It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of the duchy.  At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.  Francesco’s father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle, the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three hundred and fifty-one.  His justice tended to severity rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women.  Good Catholics will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,—­probably