let
himself quietly downward out of the mid-sky, as it were, and alight on
the solid platform of the battlemented tower. He looked about him,
and beheld growing out of the stone pavement, which formed the roof, a
little shrub, with green and glossy leaves. It was the only green thing
there; and Heaven knows how its seeds had ever been planted, at that
airy height, or how it had found nourishment for its small life in the
chinks of the stones; for it had no earth, and nothing more like soil
than the crumbling mortar, which had been crammed into the crevices in a
long-past age.

Yet the plant seemed fond of its native site; and Donatello said it
had always grown there from his earliest remembrance, and never, he
believed, any smaller or any larger than they saw it now.

"I wonder if the shrub teaches you any good lesson," said he, observing
the interest with which Kenyon examined it. "If the wide valley has a
great meaning, the plant ought to have at least a little one; and it has
been growing on our tower long enough to have learned how to speak it."

"O, certainly!" answered the sculptor; "the shrub has its moral, or
it would have perished long ago. And, no doubt, it is for your use and
edification, since you have had it before your eyes all your lifetime,
and now are moved to ask what may be its lesson."

"It teaches me nothing," said the simple Donatello, stooping over the
plant, and perplexing himself with a minute scrutiny. "But here was a
worm that would have killed it; an ugly creature, which I will fling
over the battlements."

CHAPTER XXIX

ON THE BATTLEMENTS

The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky
foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.

"Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,"
said he. "But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to
climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth
below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling
myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular temptation,
and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so
easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue,
without my being compelled to wait a moment for them. Have you never
felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you
towards a prec