as light as that of a single plume in the
bonnet of a captain. Here he strolled about, watching a brown contadino
disembarrass his donkey, noting the progress of half an hour's chaffer
over a bundle of carrots, wishing a young girl with eyes like animated
agates would let him sketch her, and gazing up at intervals at the
beautiful, slim tower, as it played at contrasts with the large blue
air. After he had spent the greater part of a week in these grave
considerations, he made up his mind to leave Siena. But he was not
content with what he had done for his portfolio. Siena was eminently
sketchable, but he had not been industrious. On the last morning of his
visit, as he stood staring about him in the crowded piazza, and feeling
that, in spite of its picturesqueness, this was an awkward place for
setting up an easel, he bethought himself, by contrast, of a quiet
corner in another part of the town, which he had chanced upon in one
of his first walks--an angle of a lonely terrace that abutted upon the
city-wall, where three or four superannuated objects seemed to slumber
in the sunshine--the open door of an empty church, with a faded fresco
exposed to the air in the arch above it, and an ancient beggar-woman
sitting beside it on a three-legged stool. The little terrace had an
old polished parapet, about as high as a man's breast, above which was
a view of strange, sad-colored hills. Outside, to the left, the wall
of the town made an outward bend, and exposed its rugged and rusty
complexion. There was a smooth stone bench set into the wall of the
church, on which Longueville had rested for an hour, observing the
composition of the little picture of which I have indicated the
elements, and of which the parapet of the terrace would form the
foreground. The thing was what painters call a subject, and he had
promised himself to come back with his utensils. This morning he
returned to the inn and took possession of them, and then he made his
way through a labyrinth of empty streets, lying on the edge of the town,
within the wall, like the superfluous folds of a garment whose wearer
has shrunken with old age. He reached his little grass-grown terrace,
and found it as sunny and as private as before. The old mendicant was
mumbling petitions, sacred and profane, at the church door; but save for
this the stillness was unbroken. The yellow sunshine warmed the brown
surface of the city-wall, and lighted the hollows of the Etruscan hills.