the flute-player to stop his
music. He did stop, and the sheep moved off, but still they continued to
look behind them occasionally, and to manifest a desire to return, as
often as the musician resumed his playing.

The life of a shepherd is very favorable for study and for improvement
in knowledge, if one has the natural genius and the industry to make use
of his spare time. Some of the most eminent men the world ever saw began
their career by the care of a flock of sheep. Did you ever hear of
Giotto, the great painter Giotto? No doubt you have. He was the man who
made that famous design for a church, at the request of Pope Benedict
IX. The messengers of the pope entered the artist's studio, and
communicated the wish of their master. Giotto took a sheet of paper,
fixed his elbow at his side, to keep his hand steady, and instantly drew
a perfect circle. "Tell his holiness that this is my design," said he.
His friends tried to persuade him not to send such a thing to the pope;
but he persisted in doing so. Pope Benedict was a learned man, and he
saw that Giotto had given the best evidence of perfection in his art. He
invited the painter to Rome, and honored and rewarded him. "Round as
Giotto's O," from that time, became an Italian proverb. But I must give
a glance at the early history of this man. In the year 1276--according
to that invaluable publication, "Chambers' Miscellany of Useful and
Entertaining Knowledge"--about forty miles from Florence, in the town of
Vespignano, there lived a poor laboring man named Bondone. This man had
a son whom he brought up in the ignorance usual to the lowly condition
of a peasant boy. But the extraordinary powers of the child,
uncultivated as they necessarily were, and his surprising quickness of
perception and never-failing vivacity, made him the delight of his
father, and of the unsophisticated people among whom he lived. At the
age of ten, his father intrusted him with the care of a flock. Now the
happy little shepherd-boy strolled at his will over meadow and plain
with his woolly charge, and amused himself with lying on the grass, and
sketching, as fancy led him, the surrounding objects, on broad flat
stones, sand, or soft earth. His sole pencils were a hard stick, or a
sharp piece of stone; his chief models were his flock, which he used to
copy as they gathered around him in various attitudes. One day, as the
shepherd-boy lay in the midst of his flock, earnestly sketching
someth