lavish clusters of white and purple all over the ceiling. It touched
Ferris, when Don Ippolito confessed that this decoration had been the
distraction of his own vacant moments, to find that it was like certain
grape-arbors he had seen in remote corners of Venice before the doors
of degenerate palaces, or forming the entrances of open-air
restaurants, and did not seem at all to have been studied from grape-
arbors in the country. He perceived the archaic striving for exact
truth, and he successfully praised the mechanical skill and love of
reality with which it was done; but he was silenced by a collection of
paintings in Don Ippolito's parlor, where he had been made to sit down
a moment. Hard they were in line, fixed in expression, and opaque in
color, these copies of famous masterpieces,--saints of either sex,
ascensions, assumptions, martyrdoms, and what not,--and they were not
quite comprehensible till Don Ippolito explained that he had made them
from such prints of the subjects as he could get, and had colored them
after his own fancy. All this, in a city whose art had been the glory
of the world for nigh half a thousand years, struck Ferris as yet more
comically pathetic than the frescoed grape-arbor; he stared about him
for some sort of escape from the pictures, and his eye fell upon a
piano and a melodeon placed end to end in a right angle. Don Ippolito,
seeing his look of inquiry, sat down and briefly played the same air
with a hand upon each instrument.

Ferris smiled. "Don Ippolito, you are another Da Vinci, a universal
genius."

"Bagatelles, bagatelles," said the priest pensively; but he rose with
greater spirit than he had yet shown, and preceded the consul into the
little room that served him for a smithy. It seemed from some
peculiarities of shape to have once been an oratory, but it was now