rnoon to behold the warlike
precinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of its
ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human lives
are spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit of
the wall.

Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged only
by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Roman
fashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, or
half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along from
end to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy
sidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic village
as from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closed
with wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,
and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.
It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when
no human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possesses
vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors of
the village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the
small windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populace
are at the butcher's shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes into
a marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing
before his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at
play; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hats
of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling
from one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing.

From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite
disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are
not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it
be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no
especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor