There were restaurants of trestle-tables in the chequered shade, where husbandmen regaled themselves with such aesthetic fare as bread and celery and walnuts, washed down by plentiful libations of amber wine; and savoury kitchens where pigs and calves were roasted whole on spits; and stalls of peasant jewellery—strings of blood-red coral and over-chased earrings; and booths of lace and embroidery. Here boots and shoes were spread beside the road; there sun-burnt peasant women were buying stays, heaped on the ground close to a stall of fluttering kerchiefs. The majolica and copper dishes were also ranged along the roadside, as were the stalls of wooden implements, bobbins, and spoons and trays. But the cotton umbrellas, scarlet and blue and emerald green, were hung like fantastic lanterns from the branches of the avenue.

What a scene it was! The lowing of the kine mingled with the distant music of the bells of Narni. Every moment fresh arrivals added their quota to the merry bustle of the market, some bearing on their heads great baskets heaped with fruit, some laden with captive turkeys and chickens, some leading in their wide-horned oxen, gay with scarlet fillets and bells slung round their silken dewlaps. The brilliant kerchiefs of the women made them look like flower-gardens as they stood in smiling groups before some alluring bargain held up to their admiring eyes by salesmen. And mingling with the crowd were fortune-tellers, and ballad-singers, and the terrible crawling beggars of Italy.

Later in the day we went down the hillside and rested in the shadow of the great ruined bridge of Augustus, that splendid relic of Imperial Rome, which once carried the Flaminian Way across the waters of the Nera. Only one arch is left to stride across the ravine, and in the middle of the sulphureous stream the second pier has fallen sideways in huge blocks, as though it had been toppled over by an earthquake. But even in its ruin it is a monument of the greatness of Rome, and it frames a wonderful vista of the wooded glen of the Nar and the ancient convent of San Casciano.

The contadini were pouring out of the city and across the river by the mediaeval bridge that takes on its shoulders the modern traffic, which, had the years been kinder, would still have been carried by the Ponte d'Augusto. They were all laden with purchases from the fair, and they made merry as they passed along, driving before them, not without a struggle, their unwilling cattle. But we did not stay there long to watch them, notwithstanding the picturesque beauty of the scene. For the pitiable cries of the mothers, struggling to go back to their calves, resounded through the valley; and the blind unreasoning misery of their offspring, driven with blows along an unaccustomed road, was heartrending to witness. Though common sense was plausible to point out how soon the agony would pass, it was too human to be anything but tragic.

So we climbed the hill back to Narni and wandered through her empty streets, astonished to find them rich in ancient grandeur. For we had grown to think of her as a pastoral queen of Arcady, forgetting her antiquity—that as Nequinum she was great among the cities of the Umbri; that under the Romans she was a fortress of importance commanding the Flaminian Way; and that in the fifteenth century she bore a famous name as the ancestral home of Gattamelata, the great Condottiere of the Venetians. Narni has good reason to be proud of her sons. One was an Emperor, one a Pope, and one a hero.

And she herself has an heroic history, for so great was her defence against the Romans that when at last she fell before the Consul Fulvius in b.c. 299, he was given a Triumph 'de Samnitibus Nequinatibusque,' and in the fatal year, 1527, she offered an historic and gallant resistance to the lanzknechts of the Bourbon when they retreated from the horrors of the Sack of Rome. For this the little citadel suffered the terrors of a sack in which one thousand men and women were brutally put to death by the Spanish and German mercenaries. So that there is again cause for wonder that so many of her ancient churches and palaces have been left unharmed, like the gracious little chapel of Santa Maria Impensole, the Gothic Palazzo Comunale and Palazzo dei Priori, and the beautiful cathedral, which is so rich in tombs, and counts among its treasures a Romanesque shrine of high antiquity and interest.

But though the Bridge of Augustus was the glory of Nequinum in the days of Martial, it is Erasmus, called Gattamelata, who is the chief pride of Narni. A whole quarter of the city bears his name. In the Vicolo Gattamelata a humble little house is inscribed 'Narnia me genuit, Gattamelata fui,' and in the Palazzo Comunale, beside Narni's great Ghirlandajo, is a copy of that Knight of the Uffizi, which up to the last few years has been ascribed to Giorgione, and which the citizens of this little hill-town treasure as a contemporary portrait of their hero.

I have another memory of Narni. One morning, very early before sunrise, we set out from that little city and made pilgrimage along the Old Flaminian Way to the altar of an unknown, quite forgotten god. It was our fancy to pay homage by the roadside where the careless feet of generations had passed by. But we had not thought to find such unexpected beauty on this ancient highway whose stones were old before the Caesars had been dreamed of by the oracles of Rome.

The Via Flaminia girdled the hillside, now disappearing round the bluff of overhanging cliffs, now plunging into bosky depths of wooded slopes, now reappearing across the ravine like a white thread among the firs and ilexes which clothe the valley of the Nera; now climbing down to the open plain. The air was fragrant with the freshness of a sweet September morning, and musical with the liquid song of larks. Below the road the hill sloped sharply from our feet to where the Nera encircled the folds of its mountains; and above us to the right towered a sheer cliff, curtained with wild flowers.

At last we reached the altar of the Unknown God, or so we called him, because, unlike Aius Locutius of the Palatine, we knew nothing of him save that in the distant ages, even before the coming of the Romans, men sacrificed and offered incense here before a god. It was only a rough-hewn table of stone, raised above the level of the road, overlooking the deep valley of the Nera where it pierces the wooded hills and widens out into that misty plain of the Tiber,—already a mighty river on its way to Rome. As we stood before it, gazing down the valley, Phoebus gilded the hill-tops. Our feet were on the Old Flaminian Road. And because the day was young and the air like wine, and the ancient way to Rome was as beautiful as a poem, we gathered together ferns and dried leaves, and lit a fire upon this cold altar of the God of an older world.

It began in play. The Poet put a sprig of scented thyme upon the ancient stone. But as the fire leapt up, and the blue smoke ascended to the clear air like fumes of incense, our laughter died away. Just for that moment all we were slipped from us. We became as children playing in a temple who turn from their games at the solemn voice of the prayer-bell, and leave their toys unheeded for a while. Just for that moment there was only beauty, and the need of worship to the God of beautiful things. No longer can we say,

'Glory and loveliness have passed away;

For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne

Into the east to meet the smiling day.'

For standing on the steep hillside upon the Old Flaminian Way, we made a heap of scented herbs, thistles and dry mullein stalks, all that the withered bosom of the earth could yield, and made our offering to the valley and the hills and the great plain which opened out before us.

So the old stone was warmed, the old god propitiated. And as the smoke curled up to the blue heavens we saw the feet of Apollo golden on the hill-tops. When we turned back we found Narni sheathed in sunlit mists, as Turner painted her, like a mediaeval saint rapt in the mystic glory of communion with nature.

The Poet quoted softly:—

'For, it may be, if still we sing

And tend the shrine,

Some Deity on wandering wing

May there incline;

And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while we worship at her feet.