refore lived a quiet life, making the
best of the present, improving his lands and doing his best to bring up
his sons in such a way as to give them a chance of success when the
struggle should come. Orsino was his eldest born and the results of
modern education became apparent in him first, as was inevitable.

Orsino was at this time not quite twenty-one years of age, but the
important day was not far distant and in order to leave a lasting
memorial of the attaining of his majority Prince Saracinesca had decreed
that Corona should receive a portrait of her eldest son executed by the
celebrated Anastase Gouache. To this end the young man spent three
mornings in every week in the artist's palatial studio, a place about as
different from the latter's first den in the Via San Basilio as the
Basilica of Saint Peter is different from a roadside chapel in the
Abruzzi. Those who have seen the successful painter of the nineteenth
century in his glory will have less difficulty in imagining the scene of
Gouache's labours than the writer finds in describing it. The workroom
is a hall, the ceiling is a vault thirty feet high, the pavement is of
polished marble; the light enters by north windows which would not look
small in a good-sized church, the doors would admit a carriage and pair,
the tapestries upon the walls would cover the front of a modern house.
Everything is on a grand scale, of the best period, of the most genuine
description. Three or four originals of great masters, of Titian, of
Reubens, of Van Dyck, stand on huge easels in the most favourable
lights. Some scores of matchless antique fragments, both of bronze and
marble, are placed here and there upon superb carved tables and shelves
of the sixteenth century. The only reproduction visible in the place is
a very perfect cast of the Hermes of Olympia. The carpets are all of
Shiraz, Sinna, Gjordez or old Baku--no common thing of Smyrna, no
unclean aniline production of Russo-Asiatic commerce disturbs the
universal harmony. In a full light upon the wall hangs a single silk
carpet of wonderful tints, famous in the history of Eastern collections,
and upon it is set at a slanting angle a single priceless Damascus
blade--a sword to possess which an Arab or a Circassian would commit
countless crimes. Anastase Gouache is magnificent in all his tastes and
in all his ways. His studio and his dwelling are his only estate, his
only capital, his only wealth, and he does not take th