apacious chest and brawny arms bared to the
shoulder, was deepened by the keen sense and quiet resolution expressed
in his glance and in every furrow of his cheek and brow. He had often
been an unconscious model to Domenico Ghirlandajo, when that great
painter was making the walls of the churches reflect the life of
Florence, and translating pale aerial traditions into the deep colour
and strong lines of the faces he knew. The naturally dark tint of his
skin was additionally bronzed by the same powdery deposit that gave a
polished black surface to his leathern apron: a deposit which habit had
probably made a necessary condition of perfect ease, for it was not
washed off with punctilious regularity.

Goro turned his fat cheek and glassy eye on the frank speaker with a
look of deprecation rather than of resentment.

"Why, Niccolo," he said, in an injured tone, "I've heard you sing to
another tune than that, often enough, when you've been laying down the
law at San Gallo on a festa. I've heard you say yourself, that a man
wasn't a mill-wheel, to be on the grind, grind, as long as he was
driven, and then stick in his place without stirring when the water was
low. And you're as fond of your vote as any man in Florence--ay, and
I've heard you say, if Lorenzo--"

"Yes, yes," said Niccolo. "Don't you be bringing up my speeches again
after you've swallowed them, and handing them about as if they were none
the worse. I vote and I speak when there's any use in it: if there's
hot metal on the anvil, I lose no time before I strike; but I don't
spend good hours in tinkling on cold iron, or in standing on the
pavement as thou dost, Goro, with snout upward, like a pig under an
oak-tree. And as for Lorenzo--dead and gone before his time--he was a
man who had an eye for curious iron-work; and if anybody says he wanted
to make himself a tyrant, I say, `_Sia_; I'll not deny which way the
wind blows when every man can see the weathercock.' But that only means
that Lorenzo was a crested hawk, and there are plenty of hawks without
crests whose claws and beaks are as good for tearing. Though if there
was any chance of a real reform, so that Marzocco [the stone Lion,
emblem of the Republic] might shake his mane and roar again, instead of
dipping his head to lick the feet of anybody that will mount and ride
him, I'd strike a good blow for it."

"And that reform is not far off, Niccolo," said the sallow, mild-faced
man, seizing his o