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The Arsenal The public gardens Garibaldi's monument The art exhibition A water pageant The prince and his escort Venice versus Genoa The story of Helena S. Pietro in Castello The theft of the brides The Lido A German paradise. I do not know that there is any need to visit the Arsenal museum except perhaps for the pleasure of being in a Venetian show place where no one expects a tip.

For Signor Cosimo de' Medici, having been created Duke of Florence, as soon as he had freed himself from the troubles that he had in the first year of his rule by routing his enemies at Monte Murlo, began to take some diversion, and in particular to frequent not a little the villa of Castello, which is little more than two miles distant from Florence.

"A courier from the Lord Vitellozzo Vitelli, Tyrant of Citta di Castello," he announced, unwittingly breaking in upon Ramiro's words, "with urgent messages for the high and Mighty Governor of Cesena." On the instant Ramiro rose, the expression of his face changing from cynical amusement to sober concern, the task upon which he was engaged forgotten. "Admit him instantly," he commanded.

By that time the duke's affairs were in dire confusion, and seeing there was little hope of further employment and none of certain pay, Messer Cristoforo left the Milanese court sorrowfully and went to Mantua, where he carved the lovely doorway still to be seen in Isabella's studio of Il Paradiso at the top of the grim old Castello, and designed the beautiful medal of the marchioness herself, which was praised as a divine thing at the Court of Naples, and which the old scholar Jacopo d'Atri kissed a thousand times over, for the sake of its beauty and of the likeness which it bore to the beloved mistress whom he had not seen for so many years.

Here and there a solitary castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts into picturesqueness from some point of vantage on a mound surrounded with green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable creta, ash-grey earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm.

Besides her sister and brother-in-law and Madonna Polisenna, Isabella had another correspondent at the court of Milan, in the person of Messer Galeazzo di Sanseverino, with whom she had formed a warm friendship at Pavia, and who had promised to give her frequent news of her sister, while at the same time he still carried on the battle over Roland and Rinaldo which had been started in the park of the Castello at Pavia.

In April, however, he was again painting in the Castello, and Messer Gualtero, one of Lodovico's most trusted servants, informed the duke, who was absent for a few days, that both his sons were very well, and that Magistro Leonardo was at work in the Saletta Negra.

Then he rode on again, to the sound of trumpets and horns, and the royal guard of Gascon archers led the way up the well-known street, with the frescoed palaces and goldsmiths and armourers' shops, to the gates of the famous Castello, where the victor entered and took up his abode in this proud citadel of the Sforzas, the core and centre of the Milanese.

The beauty of Milan, with its stately Castello and white marble Duomo, its spacious streets and long rows of armourers' and goldsmiths' shops, its beautiful gardens and frescoed palaces, made a deep impression upon these strangers from the North. Never had they seen so fair a city or so rich a land.

Adeline blushed slightly and sighed; and then, to break the awkwardness of a pause which had stolen over them, as Montreal, unheeding the last remark of Adrian, was tuning the strings of the lute, she said "Of course the Signor di Castello shares the universal enthusiasm for Petrarch?"