recent repair,
and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with
indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed
the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection
of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of
the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere
introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as
in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a
clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and
when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been
gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to
welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the
lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with,
"Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They
are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries,
and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.

It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace
of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights.
Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of
which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and
peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is
built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently
northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from
Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his
humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help
being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in
any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well
enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization
still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with
us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the
village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a
mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar
devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the
columns of the p