ess of his attire. So he disregarded society, and
society forgot him. Therefore, at dawn, he betook himself to the old
convent-yard, and stood at his easel bravely, never so unhappy as when
one of the church's innumerable holy days arrived, for then he was
forbidden to work upon the convent premises. With all his
conscientiousness he received no orders; while Stagg, who was not more
clever, proportioned to his longer experience, was befriended on every
hand, because he went to the American chapel regularly and wore a
dress-coat at the sociables.

Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli.

I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I anticipated.

A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing
before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand
extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white
and dimpled knee.

She had the large dark eyes of the professional _modello_, and a bosom
as ripe as Titian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white
and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a
bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge
of his knot-hole.

Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his
easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her
clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver
pieces with a "_Mille grazie, Signore!_" and went home to take dinner
with her little brothers.

A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a
month,--seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same
Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the
centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the
various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are
forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when
Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present.

The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a
drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept
three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen
years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed
upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and
looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral
habits, but the sec