e morrow, and of care for the master's sheep that were herded together
in the stone pen all round the hut; fighting the wolves in winter, and
in summer time listening for the sound of war from the valley, when
Guelph and Ghibelline harried all the country, and killed every stray
living thing for food. And among these half-starved wretches was a boy
of twelve or thirteen years, weak-jointed, short-winded, little better
than a cripple and only fit to watch the sheep on summer days when the
wolves were not hungry--a boy destined to be one of the greatest
artists, one of the greatest architects, and one of the most cultivated
men of that or any other age--Giotto.

The contrast between his childhood and his manhood is so startling that
one cannot realize it. It means that in those days the way from nothing
to much was short and straight for great minds--impossible and
impracticable for small ones. Great intelligences were not dwarfed to
stumps by laborious school work, were not stuffed to a bursting point by
cramming, were not artificially inflamed by the periodical blistering of
examinations; but average intelligences had not the chance which a
teaching planned only for the average gives them now. Talent, in the
shape of Cimabue, found genius, in the form of Giotto, clothed in rags,
sketching sheep with one stone on another; talent took genius and fed it
and showed it the way, and presently genius overtopped talent by a
mountain's head and shoulders. Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad
to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing
much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the
lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most
beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's
tutor, to be taught book-learning, and was allowed to spend the other
half of his time in the painting room, at the elbow of the greatest
living painter.

The boy was a sort of apprentice-servant, of course, as all beginners
were in those times. In the big house, he probably had a pallet bed in
one of those upper dormitories where the menservants slept, and he
doubtless fed with them in the lower hall at first. They must have
laughed at his unmannerly ways, and at his surprise over every new
detail of civilized life, but he had a sharp tongue and could hold his
own in a word-fight. There were three tables in a gentleman's house in
the Middle Age,--the maste