to sell their produce and to buy their necessaries.

I was for halting at each booth and inspecting the wares, and each time
that I made as if to do so, the obsequious peasantry fell away before
me, making way invitingly. But Messer Arcolano urged me along, saying
that we had far to go, and that in Piacenza there were better shops and
that I should have more time to view them.

Then it was the fountain with its surmounting statues that caught my
eye--Durfreno's arresting, vigorous group of the Laocoon--and I must
draw rein and cry out in my amazement at so wonderful a piece of work,
plaguing Arcolano with a score of questions concerning the identity of
the main figure and how he came beset by so monstrous a reptile, and
whether he had succeeded in the end in his attempt to strangle it.

Arcolano, out of patience by now, answered me shortly that the reptile
was the sculptor's pious symbolization of sin, which St. Hercules was
overcoming.

I am by no means sure that such was not indeed his own conception of the
matter, and that there did not exist in his mind some confusion as to
whether the pagan demigod had a place in the Calendar or not. For he was
an uncultured, plebeian fellow, and what my mother should have found
in him to induce her to prefer him for her confessor and spiritual
counsellor to the learned Fra Gervasio is one more of the many mysteries
which an attempt to understand her must ever present to me.

Then there were the young peasant girls who thronged about and stood in
groups, blushing furiously under my glance, which Arcolano vainly
bade me lower. A score of times did it seem to me that one of these
brown-legged, lithe, comely creatures was my little Luisina; and more
than once I was on the point of addressing one or another, to discover
my mistake and be admonished for my astounding frivolousness by Messer
Arcolano.

And when once or twice I returned the friendly laughter of these girls,
whilst the grinning serving-men behind me would nudge one another and
wink to see me--as they thought--so very far off the road to priesthood
to which I was vowed, hot anathema poured from the fat cleric's lips,
and he urged me roughly to go faster.

His tortures ended at last when we came into the open country. We rode
in silence for a mile or two, I being full of thought of all that I had
seen, and infected a little by the fever of life through which I had
just passed. At last, I remember that I turned to Arc