asy to imagine the warning blast of
the warder's trumpet as he caught sight of a distant enemy, and the wall
springing into life at the sound. Armed men buckling on their harness
would swarm up ladders to the battlements, the catapult groan and squeak
as its lever was forced backward, and at the sharp word of command the
first flight of arrows would be loosed.

But the dream fades, and we pass on to the angle of the wall where the
cypresses stand. From the picturesque Jews' cemetery, to which access is
easy, the structure of the walls can be studied in detail because the
hand of the restorer has been perforce withheld within its gates. The
wall is some forty feet high, built of stone from the Pisan hills,
weathered for the most part to a grayish hue. The masonry of the lower
half is good. The blocks of stone are large and well laid. Those of the
upper half are smaller and the masonry is in places careless and
irregular. The red brick battlements are square. At short intervals
there are walled-up gateways, round-headed or ogival in form, and the
whole surface is rent and patched. Centuries of war and earthquakes,
rain and fire, have given it a pleasant irregularity, the record of
violent and troublous times.

The city can be reentered by the Porta Nuova, only a few yards to the
left of the cemetery. So venerable do these battered walls look that we
need the full evidence of history to realize that they had more than one
predecessor. The memory even of the first walls of Pisa, an ancient city
when Rome was young, has been lost. The earliest record of which we know
anything appears on a map of the ninth century drawn by one Bonanno; a
map, we should rather say professing to be of the ninth century, for
churches of the thirteenth century are marked upon it, so it must either
have been made, or the churches inserted, then....

The ancient walls were practically swept away by the prosperity of Pisa.
Beside the Balearic Islands she had conquered Carthage, the Lipari
Islands, Elba, Corsica, and Palermo, and her galleys poured their spoils
into the Pisan port. She traded with the East, and was successful in
commerce as in war. Her inhabitants increased rapidly. They could no
longer be penned within the narrow limits of the old wall, but
overflowed in all directions beyond it. Not only was the Borgo thickly
populated, but a whole new region called Forisportae, sprang up.

So masked was the wall by houses, built into it and hud