curtains concealed the delicate tracery and the interlacing columns of
the Venetian windows. Beneath lay the Moorish garden, entered from
the street by an arched gate-way, over which long trails of ivy hung.
Beautiful in itself, the Moorish garden was an incongruous appendage
to a Gothic palace. One of the Guinigi, commanding for the Emperor
Charles V. in Spain, saw Granada and the Alhambra. On his return to
Lucca, he built this architectural plaisance on a bare plot of ground,
used for jousts and tilting. That is its history. There it has been
since. It is small--a city garden--belted inside by a pointed arcade
of black-and-white marble.

In the centre is a fountain. The glistening waters shoot upward
refreshingly in the warm evening air, to fall back on the heads of
four marble lions, supporting a marble basin. Fine white gravel covers
the ground, broken by statues and vases, and tufts of flowering shrubs
growing luxuriantly under the shelter of the arcade--many-colored
altheas, flaming pomegranates, graceful pepper-trees with bright,
beady seeds, and magnolias, as stalwart as oaks, hanging over the
fountain.

The strong perfume of the magnolia-blossoms, still white upon
the boughs, is wafted upward to the open window of the marchesa's
sitting-room; the sun is low, and the shadows of the pointed arches
double themselves upon the ground. Shadows, too, high up the horizon,
penetrate into the room, and strike across the variegated scagliola
floor, and upon a table in the centre, on which a silver tray is
placed, with glasses of lemonade. Round the table are ranged chairs of
tarnished gilding, and a small settee with spindle-legs.

In her present phase of life, the squalor of these rooms is congenial