ee them. Orte was in holiday guise: aged, wrinkled,
deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that
day with palms and lilies and lilac and the branches of willow; and her
people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and
the churches and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and
pressure around the play-place of the strollers.

It was in the month of April: outside the walls and on the banks of
Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of
millions of daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the
green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled
its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to
their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets,
and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and
one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he
blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my
youth! I am old now--ay, old, though I have lived through only
twenty-five years.

This afternoon, on Palm Sunday, I ran to see the athletes as a moth
flies to the candle: in Italy all the world loves the saltinbanco, be he
dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I
hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed:
I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my
brothers! Were they not my brothers all?

This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of
foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a
bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to
amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons,
handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each
other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke
bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word,
they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them
stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy
with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I
watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding
multitudes.

It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that
are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say,
intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with