child will give me her blessing, and the children will laugh and peep at me from behind the new-mown hay; and I shall give them greeting.  And I shall talk with him who is busy in the vineyard, I shall watch him bare-foot among the grapes, I shall see his wise hands tenderly unfold a leaf or gather up a straying branch, and when I leave him I shall hear him say, “May your bread be blessed to you.”  Under the myrtles, on a table of stone spread with coarse white linen, such we see in Tuscany, I shall break my fast, and I shall spill a little milk on the ground for thankfulness, and the crumbs I shall scatter too, and a little honey that the bees have given I shall leave for them again.

So I shall go into the city, and one will say to me, “The Signore must have a care, for the sun will be hot, in returning it will be necessary to come under the olives.”  And I shall laugh in my heart, and say, “Have no fear, then, for the sun will not touch me.”  And how should I but be glad that the sun will be hot, and how should I but be thankful that I shall come under the olives?

And I shall come into the city by Porta alla Croce for love, because I am but newly returned, and presently through the newer ways I shall come to the oldest of all, Borgo degli Albizzi, where the roofs of the beautiful palaces almost touch, and the way is cool and full of shadow.  There, amid all the hurry and bustle of the narrow, splendid street, I shall think only of old things for a time, I shall remember the great men who founded and established the city, I shall recall the great families of Florence.  Here in this Borgo the Albizzi built their towers when they came from Arezzo, giving the city more than an hundred officers, Priori and Gonfalonieri, till Cosimo de’ Medici thrust them out with the help of Eugenius IV.  The grim, scornful figure of Rinaldo seems to haunt the old palace still.  How often in those September days must he have passed to and fro between his palace and the Bargello close by, the Palace of the Podesta:  but the people, fearing they knew not what, barricaded the place so that Rinaldo was persuaded to consult with the Pope in S. Maria Novella.  At dawn he dismissed his army, and remained alone.  Then the friends of Cosimo in exile went to the Pope and thanked him, thus, as some have thought, surprising him into an abandonment of Rinaldo.  However that may be, Rinaldo was expelled, leaving the city with these words, “He is a blind man without a guide, who trusts the word of a Pope.”  And what figure haunts Palazzo Altovite, the home of that fierce Ghibelline house loved by Frederick II, if not that hero who expelled the Duke of Athens.  Palazzo Pazzi and Palazzo Nonfinito at the Canto de’ Pazzi where the Borgo degli Albizzi meets Via del Proconsolo, brings back to me that madman who first set the Cross upon the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, and who for this cause was given some stones from Christ’s sepulchre by Godfrey de Bouillon, which