stone stood in leathern collars, their flat surfaces upwards and covered
with a brown composition of pitch and beeswax an inch thick, in which
small pieces of silver were firmly embedded in position to be chiselled.

The workshop was pervaded by a smell of wax and pitch, mingled with the
curious indefinable odour exhaled from steel tools in constant use, and
supplemented by the fumes of Marzio's pipe. The red bricks in the
portion of the floor where the two men sat were rubbed into hollows, but
the dust had been allowed to accumulate freely in the rest of the room,
and the dark corners were full of cobwebs which had all the air of being
inhabited by spiders of formidable dimensions.

Marzio Pandolfi, who bent over his work and busily plied his little
hammer during the interval of silence which followed his apprentice's
last remark, was the sole owner and master of the establishment. He was
forty years of age, thin and dark. His black hair was turning grey at
the temples, and though not long, hung forward over his knitted eyebrows
in disorderly locks. He had a strange face. His head, broad enough at
the level of the eyes, rose to a high prominence towards the back, while
his forehead, which projected forward at the heavy brows, sloped
backwards in the direction of the summit. The large black eyes were deep
and hollow, and there were broad rings of dark colour around them, so
that they seemed strangely thrown into relief above the sunken,
colourless cheeks. Marzio's nose was long and pointed, very straight,
and descending so suddenly from the forehead as to make an angle with
the latter the reverse of the one most common in human faces. Seen in
profile, the brows formed the most prominent point, and the line of the
head ran back above, while the line of the nose fell inward from the
perpendicular down to the small curved nostrils. The short black
moustache was thick enough to hide the lips, though deep furrows