I am here tempted to say:  Arqua is in the figure of a man stretched upon the hill slope.  The head, which is Petrarch’s house, rests upon the summit.  The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter.  It is a very lank and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing.  We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street.  World-old stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely.  By all odds, Arqua and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merciless sun.  Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country with a success dreadful to think of.  In all countries villages are hateful to the heart of civilized man.  In the Lombard plains I wonder that one stone of them rests upon another.

We reached Petrarch’s house before the custodian had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and quite hides it from those without.  This wall bears the inscription, Casa Petrarca, and a marble tablet lettered to the following effect:—­

SE TI AGITA
SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
T’INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
OVE SPIRO LA GRAND’ ANIMA,
IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
E DI LAURA.

Which may be translated:  “If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of Laura.”

Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arqua, who had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment we had entered the village.  They were dear little girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the North.  The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took us for Tedeschi.  You learn to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities.  The people know about two varieties of foreigners—­the Englishman and the German.  If, therefore, you have not rosbif expressed in every lineament of your countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and maddening tone of the English tweed,—­you must resign yourself to be a German.  All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world:  but it cannot be helped.  I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch’s house.  She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, “Mi no so miga” (I don’t know at all).