of the city surged and swayed to and fro like a mighty sea in
motion, making the air resound the while with a wild mixture of sounds,
wherein music and laughter were blended. Amid the orgie, however, not
an act, not a word of rudeness, disturbed the general content. It was a
season of universal joy, and none dared to destroy the spell of pleasure
that presided.

Our task is not to follow the princely equipages as they rolled in
unceasing tides within the marble courts, nor yet to track the strong
flood that poured through the wide thoroughfares in all the wildest
exuberance of their joy.

Our business is with two travellers, who, well weary of being for hours
a-foot, and partly sated with pleasure, sat down to rest themselves on a
bench beside the Arno.

"It is glorious fooling, that must be owned, Billy," said Charles Massy,
"and the spirit is most contagious. How little have you or I in
common with these people! We scarce can catch the accents of the droll
allusions, we cannot follow the strains of their rude songs, and yet we
are carried away like the rest to feel a wild enjoyment in all this din,
and glitter, and movement. How well they do it, too!"

"That's all by rayson of concentration," said 'Billy, gravely. "They
are highly charged with fun. The ould adage says, 'Non semper sunt
Saturnalia,'--It is not every day Morris kills a cow."

"Yet it is by this very habit of enjoyment that they know how to be
happy."

"To be sure it is," cried Billy; "_they_ have a ritual for it which _we_
have n't; as Cicero tells us, 'In jucundis nullum periculum.' But ye see
we have no notion of any amusement without a dash of danger through it,
if not even cruelty!"

"The French know how to reconcile the two natures; they are brave, and
light-hearted too."

"And the Irish, Mister Charles,--the Irish especially," said Billy,
proudly; "for I was alludin' to the English in what I said last. The
'versatile ingenium' is all our own.

He goes into a tent and he spends half a-crown,
Comes out, meets a friend, and for love knocks him down.

There 's an elegant philosophy in that, now, that a Saxon would never
see! For it is out of the very fulness of the heart, ye may remark, that
Pat does this, just as much as to say, 'I don't care for the expense!'
He smashes a skull just as he would a whole dresser of crockery-ware!
There's something very grand in that recklessness."

The tone of the remark, and a certain wild en