its own precincts. Is your present household a large one?"

"Only myself," answered Donatello, "and Tomaso, who has been butler
since my grandfather's time, and old Stella, who goes sweeping and
dusting about the chambers, and Girolamo, the cook, who has but an idle
life of it. He shall send you up a chicken forthwith. But, first of all,
I must summon one of the contadini from the farmhouse yonder, to take
your horse to the stable."

Accordingly, the young Count shouted again, and with such effect that,
after several repetitions of the outcry, an old gray woman protruded
her head and a broom-handle from a chamber window; the venerable butler
emerged from a recess in the side of the house, where was a well, or
reservoir, in which he had been cleansing a small wine cask; and
a sunburnt contadino, in his shirt-sleeves, showed himself on the
outskirts of the vineyard, with some kind of a farming tool in his
hand. Donatello found employment for all these retainers in providing
accommodation for his guest and steed, and then ushered the sculptor
into the vestibule of the house.

It was a square and lofty entrance-room, which, by the solidity of its
construction, might have been an Etruscan tomb, being paved and walled
with heavy blocks of stone, and vaulted almost as massively overhead.
On two sides there were doors, opening into long suites of anterooms
and saloons; on the third side, a stone staircase of spacious breadth,
ascending, by dignified degrees and with wide resting-places, to another
floor of similar extent. Through one of the doors, which was ajar,
Kenyon beheld an almost interminable vista of apartments, opening one
beyond the other, and reminding him of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard's
castle, or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights.