that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might
reenter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was
evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or
wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the
hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly
understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that
direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now
and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower.

SIENA[28]

BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD

That admirers of minute designs and florid detail could appreciate
grandeur as well, no one can doubt who has seen the plans of the Sienese
cathedral. Its history is one of a grand result, and of far grander, tho
thwarted endeavor, and it is hard to realize to-day, that the church as
it stands is but a fragment, the transept only, of what Siena willed.
From the state of the existing works no one can doubt that the brave
little republic would have finished it had she not met an enemy before
whom the sword of Monteaperto was useless. The plague of 1348 stalked
across Tuscany, and the chill of thirty thousand Sienese graves numbed
the hand of master and workman, sweeping away the architect who planned,
the masons who built, the magistrates who ordered, it left but the
yellowed parchment in the archives which conferred upon Maestro Lorenzo
Maitani the superintendence of the works.

The facade of the present church is amazing in its richness, undoubtedly
possesses some grand and much lovely detail, and is as undoubtedly
suggestive, with its white marble ornaments upon a pink marble ground,
of a huge, sugared cake. It is impossible to look at this restored
whiteness with the sun upon it; the dazzled eyes close involuntarily and
one sees in retrospect the great, gray church front at Rheims, or the
solemn facade of Notre Dame de Paris. It is like remembering an organ
burst of Handel after hearing the florid roulades of the mass within the
cathedral.

The interior is rich in color and fine in effect, but the northerner is
painfully imprest by the black and white horizontal stripes which,
running from vaulting to pavement, seem to blur and confuse the vision,
and the closely set bars of the piers are positively irritating. In the
hexagonal lantern, however, they are less offensive than elsewhere,
because the fan-like radiation of the bars ab