word, a flower, a serenade. And he was so handsome and so brave,
and so gentle, too, and so full of deference. Poor Pacifica cared
not in the least whether he could paint or not. He could have made
her happy.

In the attic Raffaelle passed the most anxious hours of all his
sunny little life. He would not allow Luca even to look at what he
did. He barred the door and worked; when he went away he locked
his work up in a wardrobe. The swallows came in and out of the
unglazed window, and fluttered all around him; the morning
sunbeams came in, too, and made a nimbus round his golden head,
like that which his father gilded above the heads of saints.
Raffaelle worked on, not looking off, though clang of trumpet, or
fanfare of cymbal, often told him there was much going on worth
looking at down below. He was only seven years old, but he labored
as earnestly as if he were a man grown, his little rosy ringers
gripping that pencil which was to make him in life and death
famous as kings are not famous, and let his tender body lie in its
last sleep in the Pantheon of Rome.

He had covered hundreds of sheets with designs before he had
succeeded in getting embodied the ideas that haunted him. When he
had pleased himself at last, he set to work to transfer his
imaginations to the clay in color in the subtile luminous metallic
enamel that characterizes Urbino majolica.

Ah, how glad he was now that his father had let him draw from the
time he was two years old, and that of late Messer Benedetto had
shown him something of the mysteries of painting on biscuit and
producing the metallic lustre which was the especial glory of the