t, and the silver thread of the Arno winding
its way between--all this he saw, but he saw more than this. For it
seemed to him that the Spirit of Beauty hovered above the fair city,
and he almost heard the rustle of her wings and caught a glimpse of her
rainbow-tinted robe in the light of the evening sky.

Poor Pietro! Here was the world he longed to conquer, but he was only a
poor country boy, and how was he to begin to climb that golden ladder
of Art which led men to fame and glory?

Well, he could work, and that was always a beginning. The struggle was
hard, and for many a month he often went hungry and had not even a bed
to lie on at night, but curled himself up on a hard wooden chest. Then
good fortune began to smile upon him.

The Florentine artists to whose studios he went began to notice the
hardworking boy, and when they looked at his work, with all its faults
and want of finish, they saw in it that divine something called genius
which no one can mistake.

Then the doors of another world seemed to open to Pietro. All day long
he could now work at his beloved painting and learn fresh wonders as he
watched the great men use the brush and pencil. In the studio of the
painter Verocchio he met the men of whose fame he had so often heard,
and whose work he looked upon with awe and reverence.

There was the good-tempered monk of the Carmine, Fra Filipo Lippi, the
young Botticelli, and a youth just his own age whom they called
Leonardo da Vinci, of whom it was whispered already that he would some
day be the greatest master of the age.

These were golden days for Perugino, as he was called, for the name of
the city where he had come from was always now given to him. The
pictures he had longed to paint grew beneath his hand, and upon his
canvas began to dawn the solemn dignity and open-air spaciousness of
those evening visions he had seen when he gazed across the Umbrian
Plain. There was no noise of battle, no human passion in his pictures.
His saints stood quiet and solemn, single figures with just a thread of
interest binding them together, and always beyond was the great wide
open world, with the white light shining in the sky, the blue thread of
the river, and the single trees pointing upwards--dark, solemn cypress,
or feathery larch or poplar.

There was much for the young painter still to learn, and perhaps he
learned most from the silent teaching of that little dark chapel of the
Carmine, where Masaccio ta