, indeed, I
would that I might pose for thy painting; but, alas! I fear that to
this my uncle would in no wise consent.'

"And so, indeed, it proved. For later, when my uncle fancied that
he perceived some likeness to myself in the Sposalizio, though I
had given Raphael no sittings, he was vehement in his denunciation
of the presumption of all artists.

"My uncle might not have been so vexed but for the ill-timed
jesting of this same Bazzi. We had been asked to inspect the
picture before it should be sent to the monks for whom it was
painted, and while I stood entranced with its exceeding loveliness
and my uncle himself was astonished by the skill displayed, the
Signor Chigi explained the details of the composition.

"'It is a tradition,' he said, 'that the blessed Virgin was sought
in marriage by so many young men that her parents besought the
high-priest to aid them in their choice of her husband. He
accordingly demanded that her suitors should give their staves into
his keeping, to be placed over night before the altar, with the
understanding, in which Mary herself meekly acquiesced, that he
whose staff budded should become her husband. On the morrow
Joseph's staff was found to have put forth blossoms. This legend,
as you see, our artist has followed in his painting, for not only
is Joseph's staff tipped by a cluster of small flowers, but the
young men who accompany him, the disappointed suitors, bear
flowerless staves, and one of the rejected is breaking his across
his knee in token of his vexation.'

"Of this incident I would make no account, had it not been the
occasion for Bazzi's unmannerly trick. For that graceless fellow
chancing to spy leaning against his easel, the rod upon which
Raphael was wont to rest his hand while painting, he very slyly
made fast to it a nosegay of orange blossoms which the Signor Chigi
had presented to me on my entrance and which I had carelessly let
fall.

"You cannot imagine the coil which this trick occasioned, for its
author speedily called our host's attention to the decorated rod,
and the signification of its adornment was at once apprehended to
be my own approval of the painter.

"Raphael alone retained his senses, for he at once divined that the
perpetrator of the jest was his scapeg