rs say that
no one can model anything wholly bad in red wax, and there is truth in
the saying. The material is old--the older the better; it has passed
under the hand of the artist again and again; it has taken form, served
for the model of a lasting work, been kneaded together in a lump, been
worked over and over by the boxwood tool. The workman feels that it has
absorbed some of the qualities of the master's genius, and touches it
with the certainty that its stiff substance will yield new forms of
beauty in his fingers, rendering up some of its latent capacity of shape
at each pressure and twist of the deftly-handled instrument.

At the extremities of the long bench huge iron vices were fixed by
staples that ran into the ground. In one of these was fastened the long
curved tool which serves to beat out the bosses of hollow and
small-necked vessels. Each of the workmen had a pedal beneath his foot
from which a soft cord ascended, passed through the table, and pressed
the round object on which he was working upon a thick leather cushion,
enabling him to hold it tightly in its place, or by lifting his foot to
turn it to a new position. In pots full of sand were stuck hundreds of
tiny chisels, so that the workmen could select at a glance the exact
form of tool needful for the moment. Two or three half balls of heavy
stone stood in leathern collars, their flat surfaces upwards and covered
with a brown composition of pitch and beeswax an inch thick, in which
small pieces of silver were firmly embedded in position to be chiselled.

The workshop was pervaded by a smell of wax and pitch, mingled with the
curious indefinable odour exhaled from steel tools in constant use, and
supplemented by the fumes of Marzio's pipe. The red bricks in the
portion of the floor where the two men sat were rubbed into hollows, but
the dust had been allowed to accumulate freely in the rest of the room,
and the dark corners were full of cobwebs which had all the air of being
inhabited by spiders of formidable dimensions.

Marzio Pandolfi, who bent over his work and busily plied his little
hammer during the interval of silence which followed his apprentice's
last remark, was the sole owner and master of the establishment. He was
forty years of age, thin and dark. His black hair was turning grey at
the temples, and though not long, hung forward over his knitted eyebrows
in disorderly locks. He had a strange face. His head, broad enough at
the level