akes the head and neck ache
with pain, and we wonder how such a piece of work could ever have been
done.

No help would the master accept, and he had no pupils. Alone he worked,
and he could not bear to have any one near him looking on. In silence
and solitude he lay there painting those marvellous frescoes of the
story of the Creation to the time of Noah. Only Pope Julius himself
dared to disturb the master, and he alone climbed the scaffolding and
watched the work.

'When wilt thou have finished?' was his constant cry. 'I long to show
thy work to the world.'

'Patience, patience,' said Michelangelo. 'Nothing is ready yet.'

'But when wilt thou make an end?' asked the impatient old man.

'When I can,' answered the painter.

Then the Pope lost his temper, for he was not accustomed to be answered
like this.

'Dost thou want to be thrown head first from the scaffold?' he asked
angrily. 'I tell thee that will happen if the work is not finished at
once.'

So, incomplete as they were, Michelangelo was obliged to uncover the
frescoes that all Rome might see them. It was many years before the
ceiling was finished or the final fresco of the Last Judgment painted
upon the end wall.

Michelangelo lived to be a very old man, and his life was lonely and
solitary to the end. The one woman he loved, Vittoria Colonna, had
died, and with her death all brightness for him had faded. Although he
worked so much in Rome, it was always Florence that he loved. There it
was that he began the statues for the Chapel of the Medici, and there,
too, he helped to build the defences of San Miniato when the Medici
family made war upon the City of Flowers.

So when the great man died in Rome it seemed but fit that his body
should be carried back to his beloved Florence. There it now rests in
the Church of Santa Croce, while his giant works, his great and
terrible thoughts breathed out into marble or flashed upon the walls of
the Sistine Chapel, live on for ever, filling the minds of men with a
great awe and wonder as they gaze upon them.

ANDREA DEL SARTO

Nowhere in Florence could a more honest man or a better worker be found
than Agnolo the tailor. True, there were once evil tales whispered
about him when he first opened his shop in the little street. It was
said that he was no Italian, but a foreigner who had been obliged to
flee from his own land because of a quarrel he had had with one of his
customers. People shook their head