These wild legends have often the most powerful charm when least artfully told." So the young Count narrated a myth of one of his Progenitors,--he might have lived a century ago, or a thousand years, or before the Christian epoch, for anything that Donatello knew to the contrary,--who had made acquaintance with a fair creature belonging to this fountain.

Whether woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else about her, except that her life and soul were somehow interfused throughout the gushing water.
She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow forever, while marble crumbled over and around it.

The fountain woman 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.