forts with their coronets of guns threatening every point, and the
Croatian sentinels pacing to and fro on their walls. They stopped long
enough at one of the customs barges to declare to the swarthy, amiable
officers the innocence of their freight, and at the mouth of the Canal
of the Brenta they paused before the station while a policeman came out
and scanned them. He bowed to Don Ippolito's cloth, and then they began
to push up the sluggish canal, shallow and overrun with weeds and
mosses, into the heart of the land.

The spring, which in Venice comes in the softening air and the
perpetual azure of the heavens, was renewed to their senses in all its
miraculous loveliness. The garden of the Vervains had indeed confessed
it in opulence of leaf and bloom, but there it seemed somehow only like
a novel effect of the artifice which had been able to create a garden
in that city of stone and sea. Here a vernal world suddenly opened
before them, with wide-stretching fields of green under a dome of
perfect blue; against its walls only the soft curves of far-off hills
were traced, and near at hand the tender forms of full-foliaged trees.
The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in
the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their tall grasses in the
sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray;
the well-grown maize shook its gleaming blades in the light; the
poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight,
white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective. The
blossoms had fallen from the trees many weeks before, but the air was
full of the vague sweetness of the perfect spring, which here and there
gathered and defined itself as the spicy odor of the grass cut on the
shore of the canal, and drying in the mellow heat of the sun.

The voyagers spoke from time to time of some peculiarity of the villas