t--possibly given them by the Virgin--and a third child is
begging for some of it. The light failed so completely here that I was
not able to photograph any of these figures. It was a dull September
afternoon, and the clouds had settled thick round the chapel, which is
never very light, and is nearly 4000 feet above the sea. I waited till
such twilight as made it hopeless that more detail could be got--and a
queer ghostly place enough it was to wait in--but after giving the plate
an exposure of fifty minutes, I saw I could get no more, and desisted.

These long photographic exposures have the advantage that one is
compelled to study a work in detail through mere lack of other
employment, and that one can take one's notes in peace without being
tempted to hurry over them; but even so I continually find I have omitted
to note, and have clean forgotten, much that I want later on.

In the other annex there are also one or two younger children, but it
seems to have been set apart for conversation and relaxation more than
any other part of the establishment.

I have already said that the work is signed by an inscription inside the
chapel, to the effect that the sculptures are by Pietro Aureggio Termine
di Biella. It will be seen that the young ladies are exceedingly like
one another, and that the artist aimed at nothing more than a faithful
rendering of the life of his own times. Let us be thankful that he aimed
at nothing less. Perhaps his wife kept a girls' school; or he may have
had a large family of fat, good-natured daughters, whose little ways he
had studied attentively; at all events the work is full of spontaneous
incident, and cannot fail to become more and more interesting as the age
it renders falls farther back into the past. It is to be regretted that
many artists, better known men, have not been satisfied with the humbler
ambitions of this most amiable and interesting sculptor. If he has left
us no laboured life-studies, he has at least done something for us which
we can find nowhere else, which we should be very sorry not to have, and
the fidelity of which to Italian life at the beginning of the last
century will not be disputed.

The eighth chapel is that of the _Sposalizio_, is certainly not by
Aureggio, and I should say was mainly by the same sculptor who did the
Presentation in the Temple. On going inside I found the figures had come
from more than one source; some of them are constructed so abso