loved the youth,--a knight, as Donatello called him,--for, according
to the legend, his race was akin to hers. At least, whether kin or no,
there had been friendship and sympathy of old betwixt an ancestor of
his, with furry ears, and the long-lived lady of the fountain. And,
after all those ages, she was still as young as a May morning, and as
frolicsome as a bird upon a tree, or a breeze that makes merry with the
leaves.

She taught him how to call her from her pebbly source, and they spent
many a happy hour together, more especially in the fervor of the summer
days. For often as he sat waiting for her by the margin of the spring,
she would suddenly fall down around him in a shower of sunny raindrops,
with a rainbow glancing through them, and forthwith gather herself up
into the likeness of a beautiful girl, laughing--or was it the warble of
the rill over the pebbles?--to see the youth's amazement.


Thus, kind maiden that she was, the hot atmosphere became deliciously
cool and fragrant for this favored knight; and, furthermore, when he
knelt down to drink out of the spring, nothing was more common than for
a pair of rosy lips to come up out of its little depths, and touch his
mouth with the thrill of a sweet, cool, dewy kiss!

"It is a delightful story for the hot noon of your Tuscan summer,"
observed the sculptor, at this point. "But the deportment of the watery
lady must have had a most chilling influence in midwinter. Her lover
would find it, very literally, a cold reception!"

"I suppose," said Donatello rather sulkily, "you are making fun of the
story. But I see nothing laughable in the thing itself, nor in what you