s strolled about the picturesque way with their
lovers, and tender couples were cooing at all the doors and windows.
Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of
the first Italian painters to treat Scriptural story as accessory to
mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances
into the Ark, because he could indulge without stint the taste for
pairing-off early acquired from observation of the just-mentioned local
customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had
imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it
reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at
Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the
works of Jacopo da Ponte and his four sons, who are here to be seen to
better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the
gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man,
who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them
the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is
deaf, and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when
he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the
fact for himself.

Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom, as we entered, we
heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather
from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master
gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth
together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in
a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap,--exactly like the schoolmaster
in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretence of asking him our way
somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide, flat space,
bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old
city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the play-ground of the
whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we
had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there
in the spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for
her diligent remembrance of her illustrious d