godly, homelike places, filled from without with song of birds and
scent of herbs and blossoms. Nowadays men work in crowded, stinking
cities, in close factory chambers; and their work is barren as their
lives are.

The little son of neighbor Sanzio ran in and out this bigger,
wider house and garden of Maestro Benedetto at his pleasure, for
the maiden Pacifica was always glad to see him, and even the
sombre master-potter would unbend to him, and show him how to lay
the color on to the tremulous, fugitive, unbaked biscuit.

Pacifica was a lovely young woman of some seventeen or eighteen
summers; and perhaps Raffaelle was but remembering her when he
painted in his after-years the face of his Madonna di San Sisto.
He loved her as he loved everything that was beautiful and every
one who was kind; and almost better than his own beloved father's
studio, almost better than his dear old grandsire's cheerful
little shop, did he love this grave, silent, sweet-smelling, sun-
pierced, shadowy old house of Maestro Benedetto.

Maestro Benedetto had four apprentices or pupils in that time
learning to become figuli, but the one whom Raffaelle liked the
most (and Pacifica too) was one Luca Torelli, of a village above
in the mountains,--a youth with a noble, dark, pensive beauty of
his own, and a fearless gait, and a supple, tall, slender figure
that would have looked well in the light coat of mail and silken
doublet of a man-at-arms. In sooth, the spirit of Messer Luca was
more made for war and its risks and glories than for the wheel and
the brush of the bottega; but he had loved Pacifica ever since he
had come down one careless holy-day into Urbino, and had bound