aged, who had one beauteous daughter, by name Pacifica. He
cherished Pacifica well, but not so well as he cherished the
things he wrought--the deep round nuptial plates and oval massive
dishes that he painted with Scriptural stories and strange
devices, and landscapes such as those he saw around, and flowing
scrolls with Latin mottoes in black letters, and which, when thus
painted, he consigned with an anxiously beating heart to the trial
of the ovens, and which sometimes came forth from the trial all
cracked and blurred and marred, and sometimes emerged in triumph
and came into his trembling hands iridescent and lovely with those
lustrous and opaline hues which we admire in them to this day as
the especial glory of majolica.

Maestro Benedetto was an ambitious and vain man, and had had a
hard, laborious manhood, working at his potter's wheel and
painter's brush before Urbino ware was prized in Italy or even in
the duchy. Now, indeed, he was esteemed at his due worth, and his
work was so also, and he was passably rich, and known as a good
artist beyond the Marches; but there was a younger man over at
Gubbio, the Don Giorgio who was precursor of unequaled Maestro
Giorgio Andreoli, who surpassed him, and made him sleep o' nights
on thorns, as envy makes all those to do who take her as their
bedfellow.

The house of Maestro Benedetto was a long stone building, with a
loggia at the back all overclimbed by hardy rose trees, and
looking on a garden that was more than half an orchard, and in
which grew abundantly pear trees, plum trees, and wood strawberries.
The lancet windows of his workshop looked on all this quiet greenery.
There were so many such pleasant workshops then in the land--calm,