ts of all bright
and tender tints combined with borage, iris, hawkweeds, harebells,
crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden asters, and dreamy
love-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as the looms of
Shiraz or of Cashmere never spread. Rarely have I gazed on Flora in
such riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy. The air was
filled with fragrances. Songs of cuckoos and nightingales echoed from
the copses on the hillsides. The sun was out, and dancing over all the
landscape.

After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset. It has a
sandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the
Adriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over
Pesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carries
an English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast.
In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel.

The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has many
churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities.
Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and of
Perugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece--lunette, great
centre panel, and predella--dusty in its present condition, but
splendidly painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned. It is
worth journeying to Fano to see this. Still better would the journey
be worth the traveller's while if he could be sure to witness such a
game of _Pallone_ as we chanced upon in the Via dell' Arco di
Augusto--lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving
the great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation of
projecting house-eaves. I do not understand the game; but it was
clearly played something after the manner of our football, that is to
say; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to cover
the greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall.

Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune. On the fountain
in the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering
her veil to catch the wind. May she long shower health and prosperity
upon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!

* * * * *

_THE PALACE OF URBINO_

I

At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make
our way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, called
apocryphally after Julius Caesar, I found a proper _vettur