re."

As on their way to the cloister they passed through the sacristy, once
heaped with vessels of gold and silver, embroidered vestures, ivory and
ebony sculptures, and splendid illuminated missals, now bare and empty,
the padre said sorrowfully, "Only the walls are left to the guardianship
of these feeble hands, which must soon give up their trust." When,
however, they emerged into the cloister he brightened up, saying, "Here
you will have enough to occupy you the whole month;" and the two artists
of the party drew a breath of satisfaction at finding themselves at last
before the object of their pilgrimage,--the frescos of Signorelli and
Sodoma, representing scenes in the life of St. Benedict, which they were
going to copy. They walked slowly found the four sides, lingering where
Signorelli's deeper sentiment gave them cause for study. He was called
to Monte Oliveto first, and painted only one wall. It was only after
three years that the young unknown Bazzi was summoned, and in an
incredibly short time he completed the other three with his fanciful
creations, as graceful and airy as his character was light and
frivolous. His beautiful faces and figures came from his heart; his
brain had little to do with his work, as, without the evidence of sight
of it, the name given to him by the public--Sodoma, meaning
arch-fool--would indicate. Signorelli, on the contrary, had his ideal in
his brain, and labored to reproduce it; and his efforts are graver and
more elevated. It is to be lamented that his mineral paints have changed
their colors in many places from white to black, and that his green
trees have become blue.

The padre had studied these frescos so thoroughly as to discover that
Sodoma had sometimes spent only three days on a fresco, by tracing the
joinings where the fresh plaster had been applied, which had to be
finished before it dried. This gifted, careless painter had the habit of
scratching out his heads, if they did not please him, with the handle of
his brush; and thus some of them appear to us in the nineteenth century,
four hundred years after.

They spent the rest of the day here. Fra Lorenzo joined them at dinner,
and in the evening they walked with the padre beyond the tower to see
the spires of the Siena cathedral through the lovely poisonous blue
mist. On the way back they stopped in the tangled, overgrown garden at
the foot of the tower, which had once been filled with rare medicinal
plants, and pe