late and dismayed into the wilderness. It shows how silly
people are, for all the time he was going, if they had only waited a
little, to be the father of the most remarkable person of purely human
origin who had ever been born, and such a parent as this should surely
not be hurried. The story is told in the frescoes of the chapel of
Loreto, only a quarter of an hour's walk from Varallo, and no one can
have known it better than D'Enrico. The frescoes are explained by
written passages that tell us how, when Joachim was in the desert, an
angel came to him in the guise of a fair, civil young gentleman, and told
him the Virgin was to be born. Then, later on, the same young gentleman
appeared to him again, and bade him "in God's name be comforted, and turn
again to his content," for the Virgin had been actually born. On which
St. Joachim, who seems to have been of opinion that marriage after all
_was_ rather a failure, said that, as things were going on so nicely
without him, he would stay in the desert just a little longer, and
offered up a lamb as a pretext to gain time. Perhaps he guessed about
his mother-in-law, or he may have asked the angel. Of course, even in
spite of such evidence as this I may be mistaken about the Virgin's
grandmother's sex, and the sacristan may be right; but I can only say
that if the lady sitting by St. Anne's bedside at Montrigone is the
Virgin's father--well, in that case I must reconsider a good deal that I
have been accustomed to believe was beyond question.

Taken singly, I suppose that none of the figures in the chapel, except
the Virgin's grandmother, should be rated very highly. The under-nurse
is the next best figure, and might very well be Tabachetti's, for neither
Giovanni d'Enrico nor Giacomo Ferro was successful with his female
characters. There is not a single really comfortable woman in any chapel
by either of them on the Sacro Monte at Varallo. Tabachetti, on the
other hand, delighted in women; if they were young he made them comely
and engaging, if they were old he gave them dignity and individual
character, and the under-nurse is much more in accordance with
Tabachetti's habitual mental attitude than with D'Enrico's or Giacomo
Ferro's. Still there are only four figures out of the eleven that are
mere otiose supers, and taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant
impression as being throughout naive and homely, and sometimes, which is
of less importance, technicall