&quot;A week before the day set for her wedding, in a bright hour of early April, Hera rode forth from the park of Villa Barbiondi. Following the margin of the river, she trotted her horse to where the shores lay coupled by a bridge of pontoons&mdash;an ancient device of small boats and planking little different from the sort C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s soldiers threw across the same stream. She drew up and watched the strife going on between the bridge and the current&mdash;the boats straining at their anchor-chains and the water rioting between them.<br /><br />Italy has no lovelier valley than the one where flowed the river on which she looked, and in the gentler season there is no water-course more expressive of serene human character. But the river was tipsy to-day. The springtime sun, in its passages of splendour from Alp to Alp, had set free the winter snows, and Old Adda, flushed by his many cups, frolicked ruthlessly to the sea.<br /><br />Peasant folk in that part of the Brianza had smiled a few days earlier to see the great stream change its sombre green for an earthy hue, because it was a promise of the vernal awakening. Yet their joy was shadowed, as it always is in freshet days, by dread of the havoc so often attending the spree of the waters.&quot;<br /><br /><b>The sword of wealth</b>,&nbsp;Henry Wilton Thomas.&nbsp;