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 say about it." He went on to relate, that for a long While the knight found infinite pleasure and comfort in the friendship of the fountain nymph.

In his merriest hours, she gladdened him with her sportive humor.