si, and flowers must wreathe
themselves about the poop; leopards and tigers must be crouching before
him, and dolphins must be sporting round. But I want to have the
fair-haired Ariadne with him, made immortal with her golden crown--that
is not in Ovid's story, but no matter, you will conceive it all--and
above there must be young Loves, such as you know how to paint, shooting
with roses at the points of their arrows--"

"Say no more!" said Piero. "I have Ovid in the vulgar tongue. Find me
the passage. I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts. You
may come in."

Piero led the way through the first room, where a basket of eggs was
deposited on the open hearth, near a heap of broken egg-shells and a
bank of ashes. In strange keeping with that sordid litter, there was a
low bedstead of carved ebony, covered carelessly with a piece of rich
oriental carpet, that looked as if it had served to cover the steps to a
Madonna's throne; and a carved _cassone_, or large chest, with painted
devices on its sides and lid. There was hardly any other furniture in
the large room, except casts, wooden steps, easels and rough boxes, all
festooned with cobwebs.

The next room was still larger, but it was also much more crowded.
Apparently Piero was keeping the Festa, for the double door underneath
the window which admitted the painter's light from above, was thrown
open, and showed a garden, or rather thicket, in which fig-trees and
vines grew in tangled trailing wildness among nettles and hemlocks, and
a tall cypress lifted its dark head from a stifling mass of yellowish
mulberry-leaves. It seemed as if that dank luxuriance had begun to
penetrate even within the walls of the wide and lofty room; for in one
corner, amidst a confused heap of carved marble fragments and rusty
armour, tufts of long grass and dark feathery fennel had made their way,
and a large stone vase, tilted on one side, seemed to be pouring out the
ivy that streamed around. All about the walls hung pen and oil-sketches
of fantastic sea-monsters; dances of satyrs and maenads; Saint
Margaret's resurrection out of the devouring dragon; Madonnas with the
supernal light upon them; studies of plants and grotesque heads; and on
irregular rough shelves a few books were scattered among great drooping
bunches of corn, bullocks' horns, pieces of dried honeycomb, stones with
patches of rare-coloured lichen, skulls and bones, peacocks' feathers,
and large birds' wi