I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission on the outside.  For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces.  But it was a thing long past.  The German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes.  Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going.  They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.

I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains that tinkle there forever.  If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts.  It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries.  They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy “Comandala?” as you linger to look at their grapes.  They have each a pair of scales,—­the emblem of Injustice,—­and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like.  Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line.  Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.  Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of the terror of Attila’s sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid’s personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks,—­for in that time she was a blooming girl,—­and paid nothing for either privilege.  What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule!  And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione?  What a long mortality!