the
very spirit of childhood you see there, a naive impetuosity that
occasionally almost stumbles or forgets which way to turn; and if these
panels have not the subtler rhythm of the Cantoria at Florence, they are
more frankly just children's work, so that any day you may see some
little maid of Prato gazing at those laughing babies, babies who dance
really not without a certain awkwardness and simplicity, as though they
were her own brothers, as indeed they are. Under the pulpit, Michelozzo
has forged in bronze a relief of one face of a capital, where other
children gaze with all the serious innocence of childhood at the
pleasant world of the Piazza.

Passing under the terra-cotta of Madonna with St. Stephen and St.
Laurence, made by Andrea della Robbia in 1489, you enter the church
itself, a little dim and mysterious, and full of wonderful or precious
things, those pillars, for instance, of green serpentine or the Sacra
Cintola, the very Girdle of Madonna herself, in its own chapel there on
the left behind the beautiful bronze screen of Bruno di Ser Lapo. There,
too, you will always find a group of children, and surely it was for
them that Agnolo Gaddi painted those frescoes of the life of Madonna and
the gift of her Girdle to St. Thomas. For it seems that doubting Thomas
was doubting to the last; he alone of all the saints was the least a
child. How they wonder at him now, for first he could not believe that
Jesus was risen from the dead, when the flowers rise, when the spring
like Mary wanders to-day in tears in the garden. Was she not, indeed,
the spring, who at break of day stood trembling on the verge of the
garden, looking for the sun, the sun that had been dead all winter long?
"They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."
After all, is it not the cry of our very hearts often enough at Easter,
when the summer for which we have waited too long seems never to be
coming at all? It came at last, and St. Thomas, like to us maybe, but
unlike the children, would not believe it till he had touched the very
dayspring with his hands, and felt the old sweetness of the sunshine.
And so, when the sun was set and the world desolate, Madonna too came to
die, and was received into heaven amid a great company of angels, and
they were the flowers, and there she is eternally. Now, when all this
came to pass, St. Thomas was not by, and when he came and saw Winter in
the world he would not believe that Ma