When Rubens returned to Flanders from Italy he carried with him
twenty-one pictures done by the hand of the master.

Titian was born at the little village of Cadore, a few miles north of
Venice. When ten years of age his father took him down to the city and
apprenticed him to a worker in mosaic, the intent of the fond parent
probably being to get the youngster out of the way, more than anything
else.

The setting together of the little bits of colored glass, according to a
pattern supplied, is a task so simple that children can do it about as
well as grown folks. They do the work there today just exactly as they
did four hundred years ago, when little Tiziano Vecellio came down from
Cadore and worked, getting his ears pinched when he got sleepy, or
carelessly put in the red glass when he should have used the blue.

An inscription on a tomb at Beni Hassan, dating from the reign of
Osortasen the First, who lived three thousand years before Christ,
represents Theban glassblowers at work. I told Enrico of this one day
when we were on our way to a glass-factory.

"That's nothing," said Enrico; "it was the glassblowers of Venice who
taught them how," and not a ghost of a smile came across his fine,
burnt-umber face.

There is a story by Pliny about certain Phenician mariners landing on the
shores of a small river in Palestine and making a fire to cook their
food, and afterward discovering that the soda and sand under their pots
had fused into glass. No one now seriously considers that the first
discovery of glass, and for all I know Enrico may be right in his flat